Elgar: The Kingdom and Enigma Variations – Boult

There is a moment about eleven minutes into “The sun goeth down“—Mary’s great scena in the second half of The Kingdom—when Heather Harper’s voice simply opens up, and you forget entirely that you are listening to a broadcast acetate transferred from goodness knows what condition of source tape. The line rises, the strings thin out beneath her, and Boult just lets it happen. He doesn’t push. He barely seems to be there at all. That, after forty years of listening to this director’s Elgar, is what I take to be his deepest secret: knowing when not to interfere.

The Kingdom is the problem child of the Elgar oratorio trilogy, and SOMM’s release of this 1957 Royal Festival Hall broadcast—given for the composer’s centenary, with Boult presiding over the BBC Symphony and a chorus drawn from the Croydon Philharmonic—makes about as persuasive a case for the piece as I expect to hear. The trouble with the work has never been musical. It’s textual. Elgar and his self-assembled scripture-collage—Acts, Psalms, Gospels, Epistles, all stitched together in King James cadences that were already archaic by 1906—produces passages where the music has to do the dramatic work the words refuse to do. Newman gave Elgar a coherent poetic argument for The Dream of Gerontius; here Elgar was his own librettist, and, diplomatic considerations aside (Catholic verse had already ruffled enough Anglican feathers after Gerontius), he was not really equipped for the job. Robert Anderson once called the method “improvisatory… daring, risky, very Elgarian,” speaking of the companion piece The Apostles, and the phrase fits this score just as well. Risky is right. Sometimes the risk doesn’t pay off—the transitions in Part IV can feel patched rather than composed—but when it does, as in the Pentecost outpouring “He Who walketh upon the wings of the wind,” the result is overwhelming.

And that is where this performance earns its keep. Boult apparently told more than one interviewer that he preferred The Kingdom to Gerontius, and you can hear the conviction in every bar of this Pentecost scene. The momentum is extraordinary: brass entries land with a burnished snap, the choral fugato has real forward drive rather than the four-square plod some conductors settle for, and the whole passage builds to a climax that feels inevitable rather than manufactured. Compare Boult’s later EMI studio album, made in 1968 with the LPO—very fine, beautifully balanced, a shade too comfortable in its own skin. This 1957 broadcast has grit under its fingernails. The Prelude, taken markedly more spacious here than in the studio remake, unfolds with a cumulative weight that had me checking my watch afterward in disbelief. Nine minutes. It hadn’t felt like it.

The solo quartet is not the starry EMI lineup of Margaret Price and John Shirley-Quirk, but don’t let that put you off. Heather Harper’s Mary I’ve already praised. Helen Watts brings a contralto warmth to the Blessed Virgin’s companion passages that recalls the great English tradition of Kathleen Ferrier, though Watts’s tone has its own grain, drier, more autumnal. William Herbert’s tenor is pushed occasionally near its limits in the upper register—there’s an audible strain around the top of the Pentecost narration—but the diction is exemplary, every consonant placed. Gordon Clinton, the least remembered name among the four today, sings St. Peter with real gravity and none of the woodenness that can afflict this role; his lower register has an oaken solidity that anchors the frankly wobbly ensemble passages surrounding him.

The Enigma Variations, filling out the second disc, comes from an entirely different world—literally: a live broadcast from the Concertgebouw on February 29, 1940, three months before the German invasion of the Netherlands, with an audience that could have had no idea what was coming. There’s something almost unbearably poignant about that fact once you know it, though I’d rather not lean on it too hard, because the performance doesn’t need biographical pathos to justify itself. The Concertgebouw strings play with a burnished, almost Brahmsian richness quite unlike any British orchestra of the era. Listen to the “Romanza” (No. 13): the sheer weight of tone in the lower strings tells you immediately you’re not hearing the LSO or the BBC SO. Boult’s “Nimrod” is unhurried, dignified, avoiding the treacly rubato some conductors can’t resist; his “Finale” has genuine architectural sweep. The surface noise is what you’d expect from a source this old and this rare—there’s crackle, there’s the occasional wow in pitch—but SOMM’s transfer has done what can be done, and the musical evidence survives intact.

Is this a first recommendation for either work? No. For The Kingdom, that remains Boult’s own EMI version, better engineered and with starrier soloists, or possibly the more recent Hickox on Chandos, which has extraordinary sonic bloom. But as documentary evidence of how this music sounded to the people who first championed it, and as an interpretation that catches Boult at a peak of conviction his studio