Each Friday we select a track from a Naxos Music Group album released twenty years ago to provide the accompaniment for five minutes of your downtime.
This week’s pick from the Naxos label (8.557577) is an orchestral miniature by Elgar, music that represents a less familiar side to his work but nonetheless imparts engaging, wistful charm and immediate melodic appeal. Elgar’s Suite in D was first performed in Birmingham in 1882, but Elgar revised the work in 1899, when it was published by Novello as Three Characteristic Pieces, Op. 10. We hear the second movement, Sérénade mauresque, opening as a Moorish intermezzo, then wandering from Moorish Spain to pastoral England before returning to close the movement with a recall of the characteristic turns implied by the title.
No. 2. Serenade mauresque (8.557577)