Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius

It was the Huddersfield Choral Society which made the first complete recording of Gerontius on 8-12 April 1945; this latest chapter in the Society's ties to the work was recorded eighty years later, virtually to the day, on 5 April 2025 and displays as deep an affinity for Elgar's masterpiece as ever, especially with a conductor of Martyn Brabbins's Elgarian credentials.

'This is the best of me … this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.' Despite the inadequacies of its 1900 premiere, the stature of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius was never seriously doubted, not least by its composer who fully recognized the work's claims on posterity. This new account features Martyn Brabbins - a noted exponent of Elgar, as of so much else-conducting the forces of the Huddersfield Choral Society and Orchestra of Opera North, and marks another highlight in this choir's long and fruitful association with the work, from a wartime performance under Elgar's baton in 1917, through the first complete recording (made in April 1945-eighty years before this one, virtually to the day), to a fictionalized account of the story behind that 1917 performance in the recent Nicholas Hytner/Alan Bennett film The Choral.