Was a trick missed here, or were the logistics just too daunting to arrange?
Royal, ecclesiastical and civic dignitaries were present at Saturday’s Dream of Gerontius in the Town Hall, scene of Elgar’s sacred cantata’s birth-pangs 110 years ago, but not the personage who would have graced this performance so charismatically: Pope Benedict XVI, on the eve of his Beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, author of the poem which Elgar set to music as his masterpiece.
Ex Cathedra’s special XL Choir was joined by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment under Jeffrey Skidmore. There was much here which matched those memories: well-balanced, well-phrased choral delivery, a Town Hall organ of stirring presence, an OAE where wind solos on “period” instruments cut tellingly through the throaty string textures.
But some aspects disappointed: diction was not always thrustingly projected, neither from choir nor from soloists, whose deficient clarity clouded much of Newman’s desperate theological wrestlings.
Nevertheless, Adrian Thompson was appropriately anguished as the dying Gerontius, though when joined in the afterlife by his guardian angel he seemed inhibited by the somewhat anonymous contribution of Anna Stephany.
Rating: 4/5
