NEXT week, Malvern Concert Club marks the centenary of the first performances of three major chamber works by the club’s founder, Sir Edward Elgar.

The concert will be held at the Forum, Malvern Theatres, at 7.30pm, on Thursday, May 2.

The String Quartet and Piano Quintet were premièred at the Wigmore Hall, London, on 21 May 1919; the Sonata was also played at that concert, though had been premièred two months earlier.

Malvern Concert Club presented the Quintet in November and the Quartet in December 1919, the Sonata being first played there in 1922.

Elgar dedicated the Quartet to the original Brodsky Quartet (frequent performers in the early days of Malvern Concert Club) in honour of the promise he had made in 1900 to write a work for the ensemble - though by 1919 its members were aged around 70, and in the event the première was by a string quartet led by Albert Sammons.

Very appropriately, Malvern Concert Club’s event’s distinguished performers are the modern Brodsky Quartet whose leader, Daniel Rowland, is a solo violinist in his own right, together with the pianist Martin Roscoe. This is one of Daniel’s last performances with the Brodskys.

This concert has been generously supported by the Elgar Family Charitable Trust. The club is particularly pleased that the concert coincides with the planned release by Chandos Records of a recording of the Quartet and Quintet by the same musicians; and that the concert will be recorded by the BBC for later broadcast on Radio 3.

Ever since its first concert on October 31, 1903, Malvern Concert Club has been a cornerstone of musical life in Worcestershire.

It was founded by Sir Edward Elgar, and the club’s first secretary (for over 38 years) was his close friend, architect Arthur Troyte Griffith, whom Elgar had immortalised in Variation No. VII, Troyte, in his Enigma Variations.

The club continued to run through two world wars without a break.

Now one of the longest established and largest chamber music clubs in the country, the club presents an annual season of six concerts in Malvern Theatres, with two separate daytime concerts in various venues.

The club president is the eminent baritone and composer, Roderick Williams OBE.