Lilian Elkington

Lilian Mary Elkington (born September 15, 1900 in Birmingham , † August 13, 1969 in Austria ) was an English composer , pianist and organist .

life and work

Lilian Elkington took piano lessons at an early age and performed publicly at the age of six. At the age of eighteen she began studying music at the Birmingham and Midland Institute School of Music , studying piano and composition with Granville Bantock . She also took the subject organ and in her early twenties became a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music (LRAM) and Associate of the Royal College of Organists (ARCO).

Lilian Elkington has given concerts as a pianist in Birmingham and other cities in England, both as a soloist in piano concerts by Beethoven, Grieg, Schumann and others, but also as an accompanist and in chamber music ensembles. In 1926 she married the violinist and violist Arthur Kennedy and gradually gave up her musical career from that time on. But she continued to work as an organist, for several years at Erdington Abbey Church in Birmingham, and later at Holy Trinity Church, Sutton Coldfield . In 1948 the family with a daughter moved from Birmingham to Bookham, and in 1954 to East Horsley . In 1969 Lilian Elkington died while on vacation in Austria.

After the death of Arthur Kennedy, who was married a second time, Lilian Elkington's compositional estate was "disposed of". In the 1970s, the British musicologist David Brown happened upon a bundle of Elkington's manuscripts in an antiquarian bookshop in Worthing . It comprised four compositions: a song titled Little Hands (dated 1928), a rhapsody (op. 1) and a romance (op. 3) for violin and piano, as well as the score and parts 1921 orchestral work entitled Out of the Mist . The missing opus number 2 and the time gap between 1921 and 1928 only allow speculations about what may have been lost.

The tone poem Out of the Mist ("Aus dem Nebel") premiered in June 1921 by the student orchestra of the Midland Institute under the direction of Granville Bantock. Two further performances can be traced back to 1921/22. The work is related to the First World War and is inspired by the arrival of the coffin of the British Unknown Soldier in November 1920, which the HMS Verdun transported across the misty English Channel to its resting place in Westminster Abbey . After a re-performance in 1988, there are now (as of 2019) two recordings of this work with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under David Lloyd-Jones and the Malta Philharmonic Orchestra under Michael Laus .

Individual proof

1. ^ David J. Brown: Lilian Elkington, Out of the Mist . In: The Maud Powell Signature, Women in Music, Autumn 2008, Vol. II, No. 3, p. 45 (VIAF, GND and LCCN, however, name the year of birth 1901)

literature

• David J. Brown: Lilian Elkington, Out of the Mist. In: The Maud Powell Signature, Women in Music, Autumn 2008, Vol. II, No. 3, pp. 45-51.

Web links

• British Music Collection: Biography , Composer Profiles