Findon/Rice/Williams/Finnish RSO/Collon
(Ondine)
This is a very distinguished addition to the pantheon of Gerontius recordings, and Christine Rice is as good an Angel as any on disc since Janet Baker

The great majority of the 20-odd recordings to date of this greatest of Elgar’s greatest choral works have been made by British conductors, most of them working with British orchestras and soloists. There are notable exceptions of course, most recently Daniel Barenboim’s version with the Berlin Staatskapelle, there’s even a version conducted by Yevgeny Svetlanov with the USSR Symphony Orchestra and British singers, while two of John Barbirolli’s three recordings were made with the New York Philharmonic and the Orchestra of RAI in Rome. But here we have a British conductor, Nicholas Collon, recording Gerontius with a Finnish orchestra and a mixed chorus of Finnish and British singers, in a performance taken from a concert in Helsinki last April.

It’s a very distinguished addition to the pantheon of Gerontius recordings, conducted by Collon with acute sensitivity to the tiniest nuances in Elgar’s score. Timings may suggest that overall it is one of the faster versions on record, but nothing about it feels rushed or overpressed; both the solo sections and the great choral set pieces have just the right spaciousness, and all the necessary dramatic bite when required in sections like the Demons chorus, while the exchanges between Gerontius and the Angel in the second part of the oratorio are never made too overtly operatic nor too piously formal.