The English Symphony Orchestra's Elgar Festival fills Worcester Cathedral with local pride
Elgar Festival/Worcester Cathedral ★★★★☆
These are hard times for classical music festivals, but the Elgar Festival founded in 2018 by the Worcester City Council is thriving. This concert from the English Symphony Orchestra closed its most ambitious programme yet, and the cathedral was full to bursting. It just goes to show that local pride (Elgar was born in nearby Broadheath) still counts for something.
You'd expect the closing concert to revel in the overflowing, impetuous romanticism of one of Elgar's big-scale works, and it did indeed end with Elgar's immense 2 nd Symphony. However the evening began with something very strange and unsettling in feeling, performed by the English Symphony Orchestra, together with the Elgar Festival Chorus and the baritone Gareth Brynmor John. These Things Shall Be is a cantata by John Ireland, an English composer who grew up in Elgar's shadow, and at times it had a grandeur not far from the great man's. Alongside the grandeur we hear strange intimations of the Beyond, when the harmony becomes uncannily modernist.
It was very apt for the visionary words by the Victorian poet John Addington Symonds, which look forward to a time when 'a loftier race than ever the world hath known shall rise, with flame of freedom in their souls and light of science in their eyes.' The idea that science could bring about Utopia is both inspiring and unsettling, a feeling caught superbly in this performance conducted by Stephen Shellard, even though Ireland's ecstatic outcries and curious harmonies taxed the heroic Elgar Festival Chorus to the limit.
Compared to that strange vision from more than a century ago the set of songs Out of the Shadows by 70-year-old composer Ian Venables seemed more stable and reassuring. The songs are a celebration of homosexual love, commissioned for the 30 th anniversary of the partnership of Robert Venables KC and Gary Morris, and sung with meditative tenderness by Gareth Brynmor John. The music's refulgent harmonies and glowing orchestral arrangement (done specially for this concert) made for a serenely beautiful if somewhat unvaried celebration of a love that only a few decades ago 'dare not speak its name'.
Compared to that Elgar's 2 nd Symphony felt like a return to the unsettling ambiguities of the Ireland cantata we heard earlier. Kenneth Woods, artistic director of the festival and the English Symphony Orchestra gave space to these visionary moments but never lost sight of the overall trajectory. In the cathedral's huge space the bringing together of all the music's threads in the dying-away ending took on a special glow.
The first recording on the new English Symphony Orchestra's own label is out now and features live performances of Elgar's In the South (Alassio) and Symphony No.1, recorded at the 2024 Elgar Festival. elgarfestival.org
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