Elgar’s choral miniatures have long occupied an awkward place in the catalogue — too refined for the massed-choir tradition, too English in their harmonic idiom to travel easily abroad, and perpetually overshadowed by the symphonies and the concerto and, of course, The Dream of Gerontius. Which makes a album like this one, from Ralph Allwood and the Rodolfus Choir, all the more welcome, and all the more revealing of what gets lost when we treat the part-songs as footnotes.
Allwood built the Rodolfus Choir during his long tenure as Director of Music at Eton — twenty-six years — selecting singers with a rigor that shows. These are young voices, but they are not raw ones.
What strikes you first is the blend. Not the smoothed-out, personality-erased blend of a cathedral close, but something more supple — individual timbres that remain audible within the ensemble, like instruments in a well-rehearsed string quartet where you can still hear the bow hair on the string. That quality matters enormously in “There is sweet music,” the first of the op. 53 settings, composed in Rome while Elgar was gestating what would become the First Symphony. Eight-part writing demands not just good intonation but a willingness to listen horizontally as well as vertically — to hear yourself as one thread in a fabric rather than a voice in a chord. The Rodolfus singers do exactly that. The Tennyson text, with its images of hollow caverns and music that softer falls than petals from blown roses, finds an answering softness in the singing, but never at the cost of line.
Also from that Roman period — two years later, in fact — comes “Go, song of mine,” and here the women’s voices scale a high climax that ought to sound effortful and sometimes does in other hands. Not here. It arrives with something close to inevitability.
Elgar’s liturgical pieces on this disc are less often collected together, and hearing them in sequence is instructive. The “Ave verum corpus” and “Ave Maria” are familiar enough, and the singing is warm and clean. But the “O salutaris hostia” and “Ave maris stella” carry a specific gravity — a penitential weight — that can easily tip into mere prettiness, and Allwood resists that temptation, keeping the phrasing lean.
The program stretches from the late 1880s — “My love dwelt in a northern land,” written before Elgar had found the full measure of his powers but already haunted by that characteristic harmonic restlessness — to the late 1920s, where “I sing the birth” moves mostly in unison, its Alleluias interjected with an almost naive directness that is, in its own way, deeply moving. Twenty-one tracks, which is to say a generous and somewhat demanding span.
The disc closes with “Give unto the Lord,” Elgar’s setting of Psalm 29 — glorious, uplifting, and, in this interpretation, genuinely compelling in the way that Elgar’s choral writing can be when it isn’t being sentimentalized. There is a grandeur here that earns the word without apology.
Competing versions exist — the Finzi Singers under Paul Spicer have covered substantial portions of this repertoire with distinction, and earlier recordings from the King’s Singers brought their own sleek precision to the secular pieces. But Allwood brings something different: a sense that these songs are neither drawing-room trifles nor museum objects, but music that breathes.
Decisive assessment? This is one of the finer Elgar choral recordings in recent memory — and strong competition for the top shelf.
