Edward Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius

Paul McCreesh’s 2024 recording of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, released on Signum Classics, is the first to perform the oratorio on period instruments, instruments and playing conventions closer to what an audience would actually have heard around the work’s 1900 premiere, rather than the modern symphony-orchestra sound every other recording of the piece has used. It won the Choral Award at the 2024 Gramophone Classical Music Awards and, separately, Vocal Recording of the Year at that year’s Limelight Awards.

Elgar completed The Dream of Gerontius in 1900 for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, setting Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 1865 poem of the same name, a meditation on death and judgement told through the soul of a dying man, Gerontius, as it leaves his body and travels toward its reckoning before God. It’s written for three soloists, large chorus and full orchestra, and sits among the largest-scale English choral-orchestral works of its period, alongside music by composers like Vaughan Williams and Parry who followed in its wake. The premiere itself was famously under-rehearsed and poorly received; the piece’s reputation as one of the towering achievements of English music took some years to establish, helped considerably by performances Elgar himself later conducted.

Newman’s poem itself has a specific personal and religious background worth knowing. He wrote it in early 1865, some years after his own conversion from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, and it works through Catholic beliefs about the soul’s journey after death, through judgement and purgatory toward paradise, that had been difficult or unfamiliar territory for Newman’s Anglican contemporaries. He composed the whole poem, by his own account, in a short, intensely concentrated burst across the first weeks of February 1865, dedicating it to a recently deceased friend, the priest John Joseph Gordon. Elgar’s setting, made 35 years later, took on a text already carrying substantial weight as a personal and theological document in its own right, not simply a convenient piece of religious verse.

A period-instrument approach

McCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort & Players are known specifically for historically informed performance, reconstructing, as closely as available evidence allows, the instruments, playing techniques, pitch and performing forces an audience of the period would actually have encountered. Applying that approach to a piece as large and as comparatively recent as Gerontius is a different challenge to the early-music repertoire the group is more usually associated with: the aim isn’t reaching back centuries to a fundamentally different soundworld, but recovering the more specific tonal character of a late-Victorian/Edwardian British orchestra, with its own distinct blend of instrument types and orchestral balance compared to a modern ensemble.

The performing forces reflect that scale: alongside the professional Gabrieli Consort & Players, the recording draws on Gabrieli Roar, the group’s own youth-choir training programme, and the Polish National Youth Choir, giving the chorus writing, which carries much of the oratorio’s dramatic and devotional weight, a large-scale, multi-generational sound.

About the soloists

Mezzo-soprano Anna Stéphany sings the Angel, the role that guides Gerontius’s soul through the second half of the piece; tenor Nicky Spence takes the title role itself, carrying the work’s opening “Proficiscere” and its anguished writing for the dying man; bass-baritone Andrew Foster-Williams sings the Priest and the Angel of the Agony. All three are established performers in British choral and operatic repertoire, with track records in exactly the kind of large-scale English vocal writing this piece demands.

A note on this page

This is a freshly written review of a real, currently celebrated recording, not a page recovered from mmmusic’s archive of reviews from its original 1991–2018 run. We’re covering it because it’s a genuinely notable recent release in exactly the repertoire this site has always cared about, verified against real sources rather than assembled from guesswork.