Name: The Dream of Gerontius
Start: 2023-06-04T18:00:00
Location: The Bridgewater Hall

Alice Coote

Michael Spyres

Sir Mark Elder

Neal Davies

The Hallé

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 Almighty, a huge musical span including two of the work’s marvellous set pieces, the ‘Demons’ Chorus’ and ‘Praise to the Holiest’. Singing Gerontius for the first time in the UK is the American tenor, Michael Spyres, whom Sir Mark describes as ‘an amazing artist’.