Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, 1900 in Bloomington, MN

This performance of
Elgar
's
The Dream of Gerontius
by conductor
Paul McCreesh
, with a considerably bulked-up
Gabrieli Consort
historical-instrument group (including a
Gabrieli Players
group) and the massed singers of
Gabrieli Roar
and the
Polish National Youth Choir
, is apparently the first recording to use historically appropriate instruments.
McCreesh
includes a detailed essay specifying the provenance of the winds. The trombone, just to give the listener an idea, was owned by
and is now in the collection of the Royal College of Music in London. The instruments are not so much old-fashioned as distinctive in tone, with pleasing results. The solo vocalists are led by tenor
Nicky Spence
, who might seem on the young side for the dying Gerontius, but he offers a rich, serious performance.
excels in knitting young choristers from several different organizations into a cohesive group with good text intelligibility, especially considering that the lion's share are not native English speakers. The stringed instruments are mostly fitted with gut, and their warm timbre is worth hearing in itself. Beyond these individual considerations is the general thread of
's interpretation, which focuses on the chorus and places the work in the grand English oratorio tradition, no matter how much
objected to that word, rather than emphasizing its Wagnerian aspects. The performance is never ponderous in the least. One might not have expected
, specialists in Renaissance music, to have delivered a strong performance of this soberest example of English late Romanticism, but that is just what they have done, and this album landed on classical best-seller lists in the spring of 2024. ~ James Manheim