Time to revisit an old favorite, one of my favorite tone poems of all time, in fact: Edward Elgar’s concert overture In the South (Alassio), which is thrilling and colorful and beautiful and exciting. This piece is, quite honestly, everything I hope to find in a tone poem when I first come to one I haven’t heard.
Elgar wrote the piece when staying in Alassio, a seaside town on Italy’s west coast, in 1903. I’m not always one to draw clear extramusical associations between a work and some other thing, but…well, if I were summering in a place that looks like this, well, I might be inspired, too:
Wow.
Here is In the South (Alassio).
