Andrew Davis is celebrating his 70th birthday this year conducting and recording choral works by Elgar. In addition to the well-known pieces, he's also reviving at least one rarity – next month in Bergen he gives a performance of the rarely heard King Olaf – but with his former orchestra, the BBC Symphony, and its chorus, Davis began with the greatest and most frequently performed of them all: The Dream of Gerontius.
Outstanding accounts under Edward Gardner and Mark Elder have set the bar pretty high for Gerontius in recent years in London, but Davis's was a match for them, and in one respect at least trumped almost all that I've ever heard in the concert hall. For in Stuart Skelton he had the ideal tenor for the role of Gerontius, a singer who in a work that is unmistakably influenced by Wagner's Parsifal could handle the vocal writing with majestic ease. At times Skelton seemed to find it almost too easy; there were occasional passages when a touch more vocal insecurity might have underlined Gerontius's mortal frailty – he is a dying man, after all. But that was the tiniest shortcoming, and a dramatic quality that Skelton will surely bring in to his performance in the future.
David Soar as an implacable, dark-sounding Priest and Angel of the Agony, and Sarah Connolly as a consummately polished Angel completed the outstanding set of soloists. Perhaps it was Connolly's occasional severity, more like a valkyrie than Angel at times, that made her farewell less moving than it might be, and there were a few other passages in which Davis seemed to keep the performance on slightly too short an emotional leash. But the practised ease with which it all unfolded, the splendour of the choral singing in the great set pieces, and above all the clarity with which Davis plotted the work's dramatic course, were all first-rate.
To be broadcast on Radio 3 on 21 April. Andrew Davis conducts Elgar's The Apostles at the Barbican on 12 April.
