Paul McCreesh isn’t the first conductor to attempt to recreate the orchestral sound that Elgar would have imagined when composing his greatest choral work – in 2009 Jeffrey Skidmore conducted period-instrument performances of The Dream of Gerontius in Birmingham and London with mixed results – but this is the first to appear on disc. In his sleeve notes McCreesh painstakingly details the provenance of all the wind instruments used in the recording, which include Elgar’s own trombone, made around 1890, and the 1911 oboe played for more than half a century by the great Léon Goossens, including in LSO concerts that Elgar conducted.
Inevitably the benefits of historically informed performance practice follow a law of diminishing returns the more recently the music was composed, but in Gerontius, first performed in 1900, there are immediate gains in warmth and clarity from the gut strings, while the textural transparency allows the softer toned woodwind to be heard more easily, without losing any of the power that’s needed for the work’s great climaxes.
But though it contains many beautiful passages, the performance as a whole never really catches fire, and for all McCreesh’s meticulous research, doesn’t seem as revelatory as one hoped such a carefully prepared account of Gerontius might be. Despite its intensely Roman Catholic text – with its “stink of incense” that fellow composer Charles Stanford detected in the score – The Dream of Gerontius is the most theatrical of all Elgar’s choral works, containing moments when one really glimpses the operatic world that he would never explore, but that element is distinctly downplayed in McCreesh’s reading, which fixes it firmly in the English oratorio tradition, despite some odd choices of tempo – very fast in the Demons’ Chorus, a little too drawn out in the Angel’s Farewell.
Only Nicky Spence as Gerontius, both touchingly introspective and fiercely dramatic when required, hints at that extra dimension, establishing him as one of the finest interpreters of the role around today, while both Anna Stéphany as the Angel and Andrew Foster-Williams as the Priest and the Angel of the Agony, though perfectly serviceable on their own terms, seem much more routine. The choral singing is very accomplished too, if not as incisive as it might be, lacking the same edge of intensity that characterises the whole performance.
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