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31 January 2011

Music review: London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

Mark Elder does Elgar without a hint of tweediness.

By Alexandra Coghlan

The Kingdom – Elgar
The Barbican, 30 January

If Elgar’s great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius doesn’t quite begin with a whimper, it’s certainly not with a worldly bang either. The orchestral Introduction – radiant and delicately exploratory questioning from the strings – already seems to have bridged the heavenly divide, to have made the journey together with the “alleluia from earth to heaven”. Saturated in Newman’s Roman Catholicism, Gerontius is the stuff of air, a work from beyond the veil; The Kingdom, by contrast, is all emphatic earth – a work that can gaze and reach upward, but whose feet of clay root it perpetually in the human.

The verdict of history has been with heaven, but a few champions (Sir Adrian Boult loudest of all) have claimed The Kingdom‘s right to sit alongside Gerontius among England’s choral masterworks. As a work of national character it is arguably the greater, trading the Wagnerian influences of Gerontius for a distinctive musical vernacular. Not two bars of the Prelude, with its yearning flourish of strings and brass, pass before we are securely in Albion. Every musical device colours more vividly the landscape – the transient world of “dustceawung” (contemplation of dust) that has shaped Englishness from Anglo-Saxon lyric verse through Lycidas and of course Gray’s “Elegy”.

The danger of so much national fervour is that it can all too easily feel dated – the death-throes of a moustachioed relic, grasping after faith in an age of atheism. Thanks to Mark Elder and the generous virtuosity of the London Symphony Orchestra however, there wasn’t a tweed-clad or jingoistic moment to be found. Big orchestral gestures (matched by big-voiced soloists and the might of the London Symphony Chorus) gave Elgar’s expansive work the space and sincerity it needed to escape the snare of kitsch.

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Pacing – so essential if the oratorio’s meandering narrative through the New Testament is not to pall – was swift, Elder’s articulate advocacy manifesting itself in quality of sound rather than any lingering over climax or melody. The part-writing of The Kingdom is astonishing, prefiguring the Symphony No. 1 that Elgar was shortly to produce. Here, in the Barbican’s rather close acoustic, it retained its textural clarity while still providing structural blocks of primary colour – colour gilded by the justly-celebrated LSO horn section.

With illness doing its usual winter worst, soprano Susan Gritton was a late stand-in for Cheryl Barker, whose chest-infection had also spread to Stuart Skelton – singing, but with no small struggle. It was an interesting substitution; while Gritton possesses a sheen at the top of the voice that Barker lacks, there is a groundedness and focus to Barker’s tone that I did miss, particularly through the more sustained passages and duet of Part II. It was in “The sun goeth down” however that Gritton’s vocal shading and spun pianissimo came into their own, matched for fretful loveliness by leader Tomo Keller’s solo line.

In recent appearances at English National Opera, Iain Paterson’s particular gift for expression has been submerged, and so it was a delight to hear him in the role of Peter, coaxing line and phrase into ever more delicate contortion. “Repent and be baptised”, with its first sung iteration of the climactic “in the name of Jesus Christ” theme, would have defeated even the most disenfranchised of Englishmen. Despite Skelton’s illness, the pairing of these two voices made a persuasive case for ENO’s forthcoming Parsifal in which they will take the roles of Parsifal and Amfortas.

Conceived as a continuation of The Apostles, with the possibility of a third and final work still hovering in its themes, The Kingdom glances both forward and back. Any performance of worth retains this sense of contingency, of an utterance in a silent dialogue. It’s grounds for many to discount the work, but in the hands of Elder and Boult it is reconceived, reworked as a symbol of earthly faith – a gesture never freshly begun, nor ever fully completed, but necessarily and potently unfinished.

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