Elgar: Violin Concerto in B minor, Op. 61 + Five Pieces in Orchestral Arrangements

This Article Was Written Before Its Album Was Born

Full disclosure first: this album comes out on September 25, 2026. As I write, it doesn’t exist in a single record shop on Earth.

But I couldn’t wait. Because this story deserves telling early: a violinist who waited nearly half a century for one concerto.

The Painting from Age Fourteen

At fourteen (around 1974), Thomas Bowes was a dreaming teenager. He had fallen so deeply for Elgar’s Violin Concerto he didn’t know what to do with himself — so he picked up a paintbrush and made a picture.

Half a century later, that painting is the album cover. A boy waited a lifetime and finally packed his dream into a CD jewel case — with his own fourteen-year-old hand on the front. Things like this almost never happen in classical music.

Bowes, born 1960, was the founding first violin of the Maggini Quartet, leader of the London Mozart Players, a veteran of 200-plus film scores — a first-class player “everyone knows but nobody can name.” He didn’t play Elgar seriously until his thirties; in 2006, director Ken Russell heard his concerto, declared him “The Magician,” and Bowes resolved: this gets recorded if it’s the last thing I do.

Abbey Road Studio 1: The Room Elgar Opened Himself

The sessions took place in Abbey Road Studio 1 — a room Elgar himself opened in 1931, where a year later, in 1932, he conducted sixteen-year-old Menuhin in the legendary recording of this very concerto.

Bowes has logged thousands of hours in that room — LPO and Academy sessions in the eighties and nineties, then the Spice Girls, then film scores. He calls it a giant cello: generous, warm, occasionally treacherous, requiring a three-time Grammy winner like Arne Akselberg behind the glass to keep it in line.

The concerto was taped in December 2022; the five short pieces followed in May 2026. Same team, same room, three and a half years apart. Bowes says both sessions left everyone emotional — “like a dam bursting.” Half a lifetime held back, finally let go.

Five Miniatures: What Elgar Never Got Around To

Beyond the concerto, the disc holds five miniatures: Salut d’amour, Chanson de matin, Chanson de nuit, La Capricieuse, Sospiri. The point: all five existed only for violin and piano. Elgar himself never orchestrated them.

The orchestrator is Eleanor Alberga — Bowes’s wife since 1992, Jamaican-British composer, OBE. The two form the duo Double Exposure and have played these five pieces countless times in their violin-and-piano originals, knowing each other’s next breath with eyes closed.

What does it mean to be arranged by the person closest to you? It means she knows what these pieces weigh inside him — which notes must never be touched, where one may dare. This isn’t orchestration. It’s thirty years of marriage, annotated.

The Orchestra: London’s Finest “Temps”

The accompaniment comes from Sinfonia Arcadiana — a “recording orchestra,” which is to say London’s finest film-session players, each busy elsewhere, convened for this one project. Conductor Nic Fallowfield is an old friend; Bowes studied the concerto with him back in the day.

One hour twelve minutes, eight tracks, out September 25. As I finish writing, the album is still days from being born.

Sometimes the waiting is part of the work. A fourteen-year-old’s painting waited fifty-two years to become a cover. A few more days for us — what are those, really.