Is there some instinctive, gravitational pull that draws Russian conductors towards Elgar? Rozhdestvensky, Svetlanov and Ashkenazy ended up floating in the Edwardian’s orbit.Vasily Petrenko’s assimilation of Elgar, meanwhile, seems to have become a condition of his adoption of England as his second home.
Elgar’s first and second symphonies have become established components of Petrenko’s repertoire with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. But closing the orchestra’s 175th anniversary season with the composer’s greatest choral work – Elgar declined to refer to The Dream of Gerontius as an oratorio, claiming “there is yet no word sufficient to describe it” – was a sublime prospect that entirely lived up to expectation.
Gerontius was the work that, musically speaking, connected England with the rest of Europe; and it was the bold, turbulent tone-painting so admired by Richard Strauss that Petrenko seized upon. His interpretation of Gerontius’s passage through death to the afterlife felt resolutely dry eyed. Whereas some British conductors seem content to send the hero on his way to purgatory with a box of tissues, Petrenko punished and tormented Toby Spence’s Gerontius, to the extent that his occasional faltering under pressure felt less like a minor flaw than an inevitable dramatic effect.
The mezzo Madeleine Shaw was a late replacement, but made one sit upright from her first entry. The Angel is traditionally cast with a plummier, darker voice, though Shaw’s brighter tone glowed with a Wagnerian penumbra befitting a piece that owes more to Parsifal than the English oratorio.
Roderick Williams doubled with great distinction as the Priest and Angel of the Agony. But this was, above all, a night of absolute triumph for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir. Their security throughout the tumbling fugue of the demon’s chorus was abetted by Petrenko’s pinpoint communication of the beat; the exultant culmination of Praise to the Holiest had the vertiginous feeling of a towering wave about to break.
