The Dream of Gerontius

Elgar adapted Cardinal Newman’s poem of the death and resurrection of ‘a man like us … a sinner’, creating the work’s dynamic through Wagnerian leitmotifs and superb, varied choral writing. Sir Mark’s personal high spot is Elgar’s masterly control of momentum from the moment when Gerontius’s soul encounters the Angel, performed by Alice Coote who also appears on the Hallé’s Gramophone award-winning recording, to his split-second vision of the Alm...