Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius – Sargent

Some records you review. Others you simply live with, for years, until the grooves practically dissolve. This is one of the second kind.

I have owned three copies of the 1945 HMV The Dream of Gerontius over the course of a listening life, each replacing one worn to a whisper of tape hiss and shellac crackle, and I confess I approach it now less as a critic than as a supplicant. Malcolm Sargent, an interpreter too often dismissed by Elgarians who preferred the granite solemnities of Boult, here achieves something no other director — not Boult himself, not Barbirolli, not Britten in his one extraordinary broadcast — has matched: a reading in which architectural clarity and devotional fervor are somehow the same thing.

Legge wanted Boult. He wanted Ferrier. History gave us Sargent and Gladys Ripley instead, and I will not pretend to regret the substitution, though the thought of what Ferrier might have brought to “Novissima hora est” is a permissible private sorrow. Ripley — who would be dead of cancer within eight years, at forty-seven, her career barely acknowledged by posterity — sings the Angel with a warmth that never curdles into sentimentality. Her lower register has an almost contralto weight to it, dusky, maternal, without the icy detachment some Angels bring to the part, as though ushering the dying into an actuarial table rather than into the presence of God.

But it is Heddle Nash who makes this album something beyond a very good interpretation. Nash by 1945 had lived inside this role for the better part of two decades. He sang it, famously, from memory, and you can hear the difference — not a technical difference exactly, but a difference of address. He is not singing to an audience. He is dying, in real time, in front of a microphone in Kingsway Hall, and somehow persuading a full chorus and orchestra to die along with him.

Listen to “Sanctus fortis” — the ease with which he negotiates the tenor’s cruelest tessitura, never once forcing, never barking the top notes the way lesser Gerontii do when panic sets in around the passaggio. Listen especially to “I went to sleep,” where his tone goes bleached, inward, almost disembodied — a chilling effect achieved with nothing more than breath control and the courage to sing quietly when every instinct in a tenor screams to swell. And that phrase near the close of Part I, “the like of whom, in that fell energy of woe” — the word “horror” vested with an almost physical shudder, the consonants of “do to death” gulped rather than sung, as if the throat itself were closing. Once, I’m told, this kind of intensity got dismissed by younger critics as quasi-operatic, an overripe Edwardian mannerism unsuited to Newman’s austere theology. I don’t hear it that way and haven’t for forty years. I hear an actor who happens to have an extraordinary lyric tenor, deploying both in total service of the text.

Part II brings a different kind of miracle: conversational ease, almost chamber-music intimacy, in “I would have nothing” and “I had ever believed.” These are passages where lesser tenors coast, waiting for the big moments to return. Nash treats them as the dramatic hinge they are.

The Huddersfield Choral Society sings with a fierce, unpolished commitment that some might call rough — the sopranos occasionally strain at the top of “Praise to the Holiest,” the demons’ chorus has real teeth rather than studio politeness — and I would not trade a decibel of it for the smoother blend of later recordings. Everyone involved, chorus included, seems to have understood exactly what was at stake.

Sargent’s contribution deserves more credit than history has given him. His rubato is never willful. It breathes with the text, expanding at moments of spiritual crisis and snapping back to a forward-moving pulse the instant sentimentality threatens. The transition into the demons’ music has a visceral snarl to it that later, more “radiant” recordings — Boult’s 1968 version among them — simply don’t risk.

Later versions offer superior sonics, certainly — Britten’s broadcast has a live-wire tension of its own, and Boult’s studio remakes have an orchestral sheen Sargent’s forces can’t match. None of them touches this for sheer dramatic conviction. Seventy-nine years on, still the standard by which every Gerontius must be measured, and still, in my experience, unmatched.