Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius album review – thoughtful and acutely sensitive to tiniest nuances

The great majority of the 20-odd recordings to date of this greatest of Elgar’s greatest choral works have been made by British conductors, most of them working with British orchestras and soloists. There are notable exceptions of course, most recently Daniel Barenboim’s version with the Berlin Staatskapelle, there’s even a version conducted by Yevgeny Svetlanov with the USSR Symphony Orchestra and British singers, while two of John Barbirolli’s three recordings were made with the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra of RAI in Rome. But here we have a British conductor, Nicholas Collon, recording Gerontius with a Finnish orchestra and a mixed chorus of Finnish and British singers, in a performance taken from a concert in Helsinki last April.

Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius album art. Photograph: Ondine

It’s a very distinguished addition to the pantheon of Gerontius recordings, conducted by Collon with acute sensitivity to the tiniest nuances in Elgar’s score. Timings may suggest that overall it is one of the faster versions on record, but nothing about it feels rushed or overpressed; both the solo sections and the great choral set pieces have just the right spaciousness, and all the necessary dramatic bite when required in sections like the Demons chorus, while the exchanges between Gerontius and the Angel in the second part of the oratorio are never made too overtly operatic nor too piously formal.

The impressive Gerontius is the young Scottish tenor John Findon, with the right heroic edge to his tone in his moments of extremity but a softer, more lyrical core in moments of reflection. Both the mezzo and baritone parts are taken by singers who have regularly sung the work in concert but never recorded it before. Christine Rice is a fabulously sympathetic Angel and, praise indeed, as good as any on disc since Janet Baker, while Roderick Williams may lack the ideal weight and darkness of tone for the Priest and the Angel of the Agony, but more than compensates for that in the way in which typically he shapes and point every phrase so purposefully; his contribution is as thoughtful as every other element in Collon’s performance.

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