Elgar: Part-Songs and Choral Works – Rodolfus Choir

Elgar never quite trusted the choral medium to carry his deepest secrets — that was reserved for the orchestra, for the cello concerto’s autumnal ache, for the enigma he never fully explained. But he wrote for chorus constantly, almost compulsively, and this new collection from the Rodolfus Choir makes a persuasive case that we’ve been wrong to file so much of it under “occasional” and move on.

Ralph Allwood founded this choir out of the Eton Choral Course, and you can hear the pedagogy in every phrase. Not in a stiff, drilled way, but in the sense that these are singers who’ve been taught to listen sideways, to feel where their line sits against the next one. Forty-odd young voices, and the blend is remarkably unified for an ensemble whose membership presumably turns over every year or two. Youth choirs so often sound eager but undercooked. This one sounds like it’s been rehearsing together for a decade.

The early Latin motets are, I’ll admit, not much more than well-schooled Victorian churchmanship: competent counterpoint, conventional harmony, the sound of a young composer keeping his head down and earning his keep in provincial Worcester choir lofts. Nobody would program them today if the name on the cover read anything other than Elgar. But context matters. This is the same young man who was teaching violin for pocket money and copying orchestral parts by candlelight, years before “Nimrod” or Gerontius made him respectable. You listen to these modest pieces the way you’d look at juvenilia in a sketchbook — mildly, indulgently, with an eye already trained on what’s coming.

What’s coming, eventually, is “My love dwelt in a northern land,” Elgar’s first published piece, brought out by Novello in 1890, and a marvel of sustained melodic breath. The tune wants to droop into sentimentality and never quite does; Elgar keeps pulling it back with a chromatic sidestep just when you expect resolution. The Rodolfus sopranos and tenors phrase the long lines beautifully here, breathing as one, though I’d have liked slightly more weight in the lower voices to ground the harmony. A small caveat, easily forgiven.

“As torrents in summer,” salvaged from the wreckage of King Olaf — really the only part of that sprawling 1896 cantata anyone still performs — gets a reading of unaffected freshness. Choral societies tend to sentimentalize this miniature into treacle. Allwood’s young singers keep it light on its feet, almost conversational, and it’s the better for it.

The real discoveries, for me, sit at opposite ends of Elgar’s career and both involve texts a shade more sophisticated than his usual fare. The op. 53 set, composed during that Roman winter of 1907–08 when Alice Elgar was fussing over his health and the composer was supposedly resting, gives us “There is sweet music,” an eight-part Tennyson setting that splits the choir bitonally — women in one key, men in another, sliding past each other like two conversations in different rooms. It’s an audacious effect for 1907. The choir handles the harmonic friction without smearing the tuning, which is harder than it sounds when you’re asking young ears to hold a pitch against contradictory information from the neighboring section.

“Owls,” the companion piece in that same opus, is frankly eccentric — bleak, static, harmonically becalmed, setting Elgar’s own gloomy verses about mortality with an almost expressionist bareness. It unsettles. Good.

Then, decades later, two miniatures from Elgar’s twilight: “The Prince of Sleep” (1925), a de la Mare setting with a tender, weary melancholy that anticipates the introspection of the chamber music from the same period, and “I sing the birth” (1928), a Ben Jonson Christmas piece too rarely heard, sung here with real tenderness by soloists the booklet, alas, fails to credit properly. Only the tenor gets a name, which is a shabby oversight given how well the anonymous soprano and baritone acquit themselves.

Against the historical touchstones — the King’s College and Finzi Singers recordings that have long occupied this repertoire’s small discography — Allwood’s version doesn’t try to compete on institutional gravitas or cathedral acoustic. It offers something different: the sound of youth discovering this music rather than inheriting it. I found that refreshing more often than not, though a listener wanting the last ounce of Edwardian richness in the bigger part-songs might reach elsewhere first.

Still, a worthwhile disc, generously annotated (crediting lapses aside), and a genuine service to a corner of Elgar’s output that deserves better than the occasional appearance at a school prize-giving. Recommended, with enthusiasm outrunning my reservations.