From the hushed intensity of the string-playing in the opening bars, it is clear that Elder will give us a Gerontius of Parsifal-like spiritual depth, and so it proves. Purely from the point of view of the orchestral playing and the choral singing, Elder’s account of Elgar’s choral masterpiece ranks with the greatest ever committed to disc. Listen to the climactic Praise to the Holiest in Part II to hear the galvanising impact Elder has had on his Manchester forces. His experience as an opera conductor makes this the most dramatic Gerontius since Barbirolli’s, but Elder stays closer to the spirit of the score than the famously “personal” older conductor did. No modern recording has an ideal cast, but this one has no great weakness, and two of its participants — Alice Coote’s gentle, consoling, deeply moving Angel, and Bryn Terfel as the Priest and Angel of the Agony — have surely never been bettered. Coote is a modern singer, so she makes the Angel sexier than the stately oratorio voices of Janet Baker (in the Barbirolli recording), Helen Watts and Marjorie Thomas. Paul Groves’s Gerontius is in the lyrical, rather than heroic, tradition of singing the title role. A fine Mozartian, he is scrupulous with the notes and his diction cannot be faulted. He is at his best in the score’s more introverted passages, but he occasionally sounds taxed — by the “Verdian” Sanctus fortis and the Heldentenor-ish Take Me Away!, where his tone loses firmness. This is a small price to pay for a memorable reading of this great score, superbly recorded under studio conditions by Andrew Keener and his team.

Hallé CD HLD7520

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