Elgar: The Light of Life – Hickox

Every composer has a work like this tucked somewhere in the back catalog — the one you programmed dutifully once, admired in patches, and never quite loved. For Elgar that piece is The Light of Life, and it deserves better than the half-attention it usually gets.

Worcester, 1896. Elgar was pushing forty, still scraping by on teaching fees and the occasional commission, still some years from knighthood. He knew the Three Choirs circuit intimately — he’d sat in those pit orchestras with his violin, sight-reading through decades of respectable, forgettable British oratorio. So when the commission came, he understood exactly what was expected of him, and largely he delivered it: solid double fugues, a competent overture, choral writing that owes an obvious debt to Mendelssohn’s Elijah without ever quite escaping its shadow.

And yet. There are stretches — the soprano’s central aria among them — where you can hear the harmonic imagination that would, within four years, produce The Dream of Gerontius. The chromatic sidesteps, the orchestral color used not merely to accompany but to comment. It’s there, in embryo. Just don’t expect it to last. Too much of the piece jog-trots along on the sort of four-square rhythmic tread that Victorian audiences apparently found consoling and that modern ears find, frankly, a slog.

This new recording gives us Judith Howarth as the Mother, Linda Finnie as the Narrator, Arthur Davies as the Blind Man. A well-schooled trio, technically assured. And yet I kept measuring them against Groves’s mid-1970s account with Margaret Marshall and Dame Helen Watts, and the newcomers came up short more often than I’d like.

Howarth has the voice for it — full-bodied, warm at the center — but her vibrato widens exactly where you want the text to land. “Be not extreme, O Lord” needs textual pointing, a sense of each syllable arriving with purpose; instead the words blur into vocal weather. She rallies for the climactic “Lighten, O lighten mine eyes, O Lord,” where the vibrato becomes an asset rather than a liability, riding the orchestral surge with real dramatic heat. But too much of the aria passes in a haze.

Marshall, on the older disc, simply articulates better. Every consonant registers without the tone ever thinning or the line losing its bloom, that particular gift for combining verbal clarity with vocal generosity that so few sopranos manage and that made her such a natural in this repertoire and in Mozart. It isn’t a matter of one great moment against another. It’s consistency, sustained across nearly three-quarters of an hour of music, and Marshall simply has more of it.

Finnie’s difficulty is one of weight, not mastery. As the Narrator she has to move the story along — think of her role as something like the Evangelist in a Bach Passion, ballast rather than ornament — and her sound, rich and covered as it is, lacks the forward, speech-inflected immediacy the part wants. Helen Watts, by contrast, brought a plainness to these passages that let the words do the work; you believed you were being told a story rather than sung an aria. It’s a difference of temperament as much as instrument, and it matters more here than it might in Elgar’s later, more symphonically conceived vocal writing, where the orchestra carries so much of the narrative weight itself.

Arthur Davies acquits himself well enough — clean, unforced tenor tone, no strain at the top — though the role of the Blind Man doesn’t give him much chance to do more than deliver his lines competently. It isn’t ungrateful writing, exactly. It’s just not writing that asks for interpretation so much as accurate execution, and Davies gives you that without argument.

None of this should discourage anyone curious about early Elgar from seeking the disc out. Quite the contrary. The choral passages have genuine sweep, the orchestration already shows that unmistakable Elgarian richness in the string writing, and there’s real value in hearing where the composer of the Enigma Variations and Gerontius came from before he arrived. But as a library choice, Groves’s Chandos album remains the safer bet, chiefly on the strength of its women. This new version is honorable, sometimes touching, occasionally thrilling — and finally a runner-up.