Mayfield Festival Choir, Mayfield School Schola and the Ripieno Orchestra directed by Jeremy Summerly with soloists Francis Melville and Ross Fettes.

Puccini’s Messa di Gloria was a graduation exercise, although you’d never know it. Even in his early 20s, Puccini was crafting tunes and creating drama as he later would as a mature opera composer. Elgar, by contrast, never wrote an opera: he didn’t need to. He spent 20 years thinking about his Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85, which was his dramatic masterpiece.

This was performed as part of the 2024 Mayfield Festival of Music and the Arts in a programme that also included Elgar’s Cello Concerto with Edvard Pogossian.