Elgar
Thomas Bowes Violin

‘Almost as long as I can remember, Elgar’s music has been for me a source of solace, of affirmation, and of feeling things deeply. My relationship with his music, and particularly the violin concerto, goes way back to my teens. And in about 1974, probably to make sense of these feelings, a rather dreamy fourteen-year-old made the picture on the cover of this album.
I didn’t start to play any of Elgar’s music seriously until my 30’s. But around then too, I started to develop close relationships with all those who are part of this recording. With Eleanor Alberga (we got married in 1992) I played many times the short pieces featured here, along with the Sonata, in our recital programmes. With conductor Nic Fallowfield, I played and studied the concerto, whilst with Arne Akselberg (sound engineer) and Stephen Frost (producer and editor) I started to make my own recordings of Bach and other music. By 2022 the need to record some Elgar had crystalised as to be an imperative and I realised that the ideal orchestra and studio were already very much part of my professional life. So, in December of that year in Abbey Rd Studio 1, as fine a band as is anywhere and with whom I had spent countless hours recording film music was fixed by Susie Gillis at Isobel Griffiths Ltd to record the concerto. In May of ’26 we convened again to record the new Alberga arrangements of the five shorter pieces. So, Sinfonia Arcadiana is that mystifying thing – a recording orchestra, or to put it more plainly, a session band. Make no mistake though as to its pedigree. Here are players of vast experience (look at the list) and great sensibility who came together for this project in a spirit of huge enthusiasm. Never was a ‘soloist’ so supported. There was tremendous significance too in creating this recording in Studio 1 at Abbey Rd. This space was opened by Elgar in 1931, and he recorded much of his own music in his last years here – most famously the violin concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin. How often I have sat in this very room gazing into its airy spaces hoping to catch some of the embers’. – Thomas Bowes

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reviews

“This could almost be described as a bespoke Elgar Violin Concerto: all the ingredients were hand-picked by the soloist – Thomas Bowes – to fulfil a lifetime’s ambition. He even adorns the booklet cover with his own touching teenage painting of a famous Elgar photograph. And he cites his years of playing as a session artist in the iconic Abbey Road studios as one inspiration for this album: Elgar opened the venue in 1931 and the following year recorded the Violin Concerto there with child prodigy Yehudi Menuhin. Bowes therefore gathered a full orchestra towards the end of 2022 drawn from his many colleagues in the session business – a very distinguished group, as the listing demonstrates – and as Sinfonia Arcadiana under Nic Fallowfield’s empathetic direction they provided a remarkable backdrop for Bowes’s performance. Such a single-minded personal project might suggest that the result would turn out to be ego-driven and little else – but the very opposite is luckily the case here. All concerned seem motivated only by a deep love for this unique English masterpiece.” – Geraint Lewis, Gramophone Magazine