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 HEAVENLY GERONTIUS LAUNCHES NEW CBSO SEASON

CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★

Whenever Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ is performed in Birmingham it feels like it has come home. The city was home to its author Cardinal Newman, his burial place and where in 2010 he became a saint, beatified by Pope Benedict XVI at a ceremony in the city’s Cofton Park attended by 50,000 people. It always brings out the best in the performers: the orchestra, CBSO Choir, soloists and conductor cohere in triumphant unity. That happened here in 2023 when Ryan Wigglesworth, a late replacement for the mortally ill Elgar specialist Sir Andrew Davis, conducted like a man possessed. Here the CBSO’s music director Kazuki Yamada was equally as effective in an entirely different way. That most flamboyant of conductors became utterly self-effacing, subsumed entirely by and in the music. Most of the time I didn’t notice he was there. I’m not being facetious – that’s a compliment. At the end of this triumphant performance the loudest cheer, on a night of many loud acclamations, was for Simon Halsey in his final concert as Director of the CBSO Choruses, a role he has held since 1982 during which time he has made the CBSO Chorus the envy of the musical world as the orchestra’s Chief Executive Emma Stenning rightly said in her pre-concert address. There were around 150 members of the CBSO Chorus here and they were totally assured in every facet of Elgar’s demanding music from the hush of spiritual support for the dying Gerontius to the whiff of brimstone and tortured irony as his demonic tormentors.

The trio of excellent soloists provided fascinating contrasts with their 2023 counterparts. Then we had a true Wagnerian heldentenor Gerontius (Brenden Gunnell), a mature mezzo-soprano Angel (Alice Coote) and a bass (Ashley Riches). Now Gerontius was the more traditional choice of a lyric tenor and Benjamin Hulett demonstrated what a fine singer he is when meeting every demand of the role. To plead without whining, be stricken without being lachrymose, humble without grovelling and to do so with impeccable tone and legato. A rule-of-thumb measure of this role is can the singer convince in the extremes of “Jesu, Maria – I am near to death” and the declamatory “Take me away”? Hulett certainly did. Jess Dandy is a young singer of great promise and a rarity in modern times, being a genuine contralto. A little diffident at first she grew in authority. Without entering the minefield of gender identity the text refers to the Angel as male but Elgar chose a female singer. I suspect he had a voice like Dandy’s in mind where, in low-lying passages, shut your eyes and the vocal quality blurs the sexual boundaries. All that is forgotten, probably by Elgar also, at the work’s climax when Gerontius’s soul enters Purgatory ushered in by the Angel. Dandy’s words of comfort, were a wonderful vocal balm: “Softly and gently, dearly ransomed soul, In my most loving arms I now enfold thee”. The asexual Angel is transformed into Magna Mater the great Earth Mother. You don’t have to be a Jungian to know an Archetype when you hear one sung with such tenderness and authority as Dandy demonstrated. Using one singer for both the Priest and Angel of the Agony always involves a compromise, ideally a baritone and bass profundo are needed. The baritone Roderick Williams brought his skills as a great lieder singer to the text, words really sprang to life. His reiterations of “Jesu…” in the plea for mercy as Gerontius prepares to meet his Judge tolled and rang with immense power.

The playing of the orchestra matched the quality of the singing. The Prelude, in which Elgar like a painter prepares his pallet of themes and motifs – colours often supplied by Herr Wagner – were all subtlety and clarity but the approach of Judgement was explosive, and their sardonic howling brass and sneering woodwind was the perfect accompaniment for the demonic chorus. The musicologist Michael Steinberg wrote that, “It has been a commonplace of criticism to say that this passage is the one failure in Elgar’s score, but the fault is more in conductors and choruses.” He was right. The CBSO Chorus found half a dozen different ways to express the repeated “Ha Ha” and Yamada elicited the same ferocity he did for a similar scene in last year’s Berlioz ‘Damnation of Faust’. Elgar didn’t want “Church tunes and rubbish”, for ‘Gerontius’, but “good, healthy full-blooded romantic” music. He certainly got his wish here.

Norman Stinchcombe

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