Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius album review – Spence soars in otherwise passion-light period instrument recording

McCreesh/Stéphany/Spence/Foster-Williams
(Signum, two CDs)
Paul McCreesh’s historically informed performance of the composer’s greatest choral work has many gains but ultimately never really catches fire

Paul McCreesh isn’t the first conductor to attempt to recreate the orchestral sound that Elgar would have imagined when composing his greatest choral work – in 2009 Jeffrey Skidmore conducted period-instrument performances of The Dream of Gerontius in Birmingham and London with mixed results – but this is the first to appear on disc. In his sleeve notes McCreesh painstakingly details the provenance of all the wind instruments used in the recording, which include Elgar’s own trombone, made around 1890, and the 1911 oboe played for more than half a century by the great Léon Goossens, including in LSO concerts that Elgar conducted.

Inevitably the benefits of historically informed performance practice follow a law of diminishing returns the more recently the music was composed, but in Gerontius, first performed in 1900, there are immediate gains in warmth and clarity from the gut strings, while the textural transparency allows the softer toned woodwind to be heard more easily, without losing any of the power that’s needed for the work’s great climaxes.

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