Lilian Elkingtonaus modern

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

Life and work

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

Lilian Elkington performed as a pianist in Birmingham and other cities in England, both as a soloist in piano concertos 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 from this time on gradually gave up her musical career. She continued to play the organ for several years at Erdington Abbey Church in Birmingham, and later at Holy Trinity Church, Sutton Coldfield. In 1948 the family, who had a daughter, moved from Birmingham to Bookham, then to East Horsley in 1954. In 1969 Lilian Elkington died while on holiday 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 came across a bundle of Elkington’s manuscripts in a second-hand bookshop in Worthing. It included four compositions: a song entitled Little Hands (dated 1928), a Rhapsody (op. 1) and a Romance (op. 3) for violin and piano, as well as the score and parts of an orchestral work entitled Out of the Mist, dated 1921. The missing opus number 2 and the time gap between 1921 and 1928 only allow speculation about what may have been lost.

The tone poem Out of the Mist was premiered in June 1921 by the Midland Institute Student Orchestra conducted by Granville Bantock. There is evidence of two further performances in 1921/22. The work is related to the First World War and was inspired by the arrival of the coffin of the British Unknown Soldier in November 1920, transported by HMS Verdun across the foggy English Channel to his resting place in Westminster Abbey. Following a revival 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 respectively.
Source Wiki: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilian_Elkington