Something for Thursday

I suddenly thought of this piece the other day, after quite literally not having thought of it in nearly twenty years. I listened to it a lot in college, and then it dropped off my radar completely, for some reason. Sir Edward Elgar is often pigeonholed into the notion of a stuffy Brit who wrote stuffy music for the "stiff upper lip, Keep Calm and Carry On" generation, but in truth, he wrote a lot of passionate, dramatic, Romantic music, and he was as fine a tone painter as anyone, as this concert overture demonstrates. He wrote this work out of inspirations he received whilst on a family holiday to Italy. Here is "Alassio (In the South)".