Swathed in enough gold lamé to lighten anyone’s darkness, the star American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton turns out to be the kind of supernatural being a newly dead soul might hope to meet as they enter purgatory. This place of expiation features heavily in Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (1900), settings of texts by Cardinal John Henry Newman, which was given a properly out-of-this-world performance at the Proms on Wednesday. The massed forces of Manchester’s Hallé Choir and the London Philharmonic Choir, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Edward Gardner, had perfected every awkward detail of this long, exacting work. The British tenor Allan Clayton sang Gerontius, the dying man of the title who finds eternity. British bass James Platt was Priest/Angel of the Agony, comforter and inspiration. Barton sang the Angel.
First performed in Birmingham town hall, Gerontius has always provoked extreme reactions, initially to its Roman Catholicism in a mostly Anglican country, now because its religiosity, with all the resonance of that word, is too much for some. The work falls into two uneven halves, the first a deathbed scene, the second a world of angels and mawkish demons. By resisting exaggeration or rhetoric, Gardner and his forces untied Elgar’s ambitious soundscape and made a consoling, exciting unity.
