Interview, Paul McCreesh on Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius

For well over a decade, Paul McCreesh and Gabrieli have specialised in a series of historically-informed recordings of large-scale choral works using period instruments. With music by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Haydn and others already under their belt, their latest project sees them turning their attention to Elgar's great oratorio, The Dream of Gerontius.

Using instruments from around the time of the work's premiere in 1900, this illuminating recording not only provides great textual clarity but also shows off the fine details of Elgar's orchestration.

I spoke to Paul about the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the work's less than successful first performance, the qualities that period instruments bring to his interpretation of the piece, and the important work that the Gabrieli Roar scheme is carrying out to involve young people in classical music.

How did you settle on Gerontius as your latest project with Gabrieli?

It's a piece you can't really avoid! It's one of the greatest pieces of choral music, full stop, but it did take me a long time to love the piece, probably into my forties, when suddenly I realised what an outstanding masterpiece it is. It's interesting how something so inherently Catholic has become such a totemic piece in an Anglican country. The other two oratorios are equally great, but I think the clue as to why Gerontius is so much more loved than The Kingdom or The Apostles is simply because of Cardinal Newman: the text is something that everybody can connect to, whether they're of a religious belief or not. In the end, we're all going to die, and that's one of the reasons it moves us so profoundly. Nowadays we would regard the text as slightly convoluted, but Newman wrote that great poem with the intention of bringing Catholic theology into the houses and minds of the working class. So it has that sense of communication, which I think Elgar picks up.

Your recording is in part a recreation of the premiere, although one aspect that I'm glad you don't repeat is that it was notoriously a disaster!

The choral writing is incredibly difficult. In those days, even the Birmingham Festival Chorus, which had a tremendous reputation, still struggled with the complexities of the music.  There was a change of choirmaster at the last minute, and the conductor Hans Richter had probably also underestimated the work's complexities. If you look at the workload of the chorus that week, it's horrific: a couple of new oratorios, including Gerontius, plus the usual Elijah and Messiah, all on very little rehearsal time. It was just one of those unfortunate occurrences, and what is still so gut-wrenching is the pain that Elgar felt: he'd put everything into this piece, and afterwards said famously that he was turning his back on everything to do with religious music. Okay, Elgar was inclined to catastrophise, but clearly it was a very bad day! However, Gerontius was soon performed at all the major festivals, and even in the original reviews there was no question of the music itself not being welcomed. It also enjoyed success in Germany, so it soon became as loved as it is today.

What are the challenges for you when you're rehearsing and preparing it?

One of the things I'm quite obsessed about is that big choirs should sing like chamber choirs, working in real detail. I think we've managed to achieve that, so that it doesn't just become a yell-through. It's not really any longer a piece that choral societies do, with a few exceptions, simply because the orchestral forces now are beyond the budget of most groups, and yet it was also interesting that very few of the professional singers involved in this recording had sung Gerontius before, because professional choirs never sing this piece. And that's great, because it means you start with a blank canvas.

We also wanted to record in a creative way, because now we have the technology to do the most amazing things. Although my principles of recording are always that we make as natural a sound as possible, we quite shamelessly recorded it in a slightly 'open' way, with very little close miking, but we weren’t shy to re-balance at the editing stage. One example is the semi-chorus, which Elgar advises should be placed in front of the orchestra, for the practical reason that in concert, where the semi-chorus is working against the main chorus, you need to hear it. That's something you can adjust more easily on recording; I've worked with Nick Parker and Neil Hutchinson for years now, and I’m rather pleased with the sound we achieved in such a complex, multi-layered piece.

Regarding these technological advantages, you recorded the organ part separately, on the famous Willis organ in Hereford Cathedral. Were you immediately on-board with that idea of overdubbing?

Yes: the reality is it's very difficult to record a big organ in situ, because in sections where the organ needs to play loud, it completely saturates everybody's mics. So rather than fight against that, we saw it as an opportunity to incorporate a really fabulous historic instrument - with very careful dubbing you can get a much better overall result. It's a really interesting organ part: it's very discreet the way it's used as a fundamental part of the orchestra and not just a continuo-style instrument. And, as well as Elgar’s own recordings of some extracts, there’s sometimes evidence outside the score - Elgar wrote to one of the early organists saying the organ should really dominate in the passage before Gerontius arrives at the threshold. Particularly in the pedals, the organ should sound thrilling and exciting.

An important aspect of this recording is the instruments that you use and what I can only presume were painstakingly elaborate efforts to source them.

I can't see philosophically why you wouldn't want to work with old instruments in this repertoire, because it's now 125 years since this piece was written. One of the wonderful things about a project like this is how much the players buy into it: they're all working phenomenally hard behind the scenes, researching and finding instruments, working out what the sound would be. The strings are the easiest to resolve: instruments don't change overnight, so we're working with a mixture of what we might call 'modern' instruments but strung with gut top strings, and 'transitional' instruments from the period of 1850 onwards which you can imagine the older players in Elgar's orchestra might well have played. The gut strings give a marvellous transparency, particularly important at the beginning of Part Two. Even with the great modern orchestras of the world it's very hard to get that level of softness.

We had wooden flutes and French oboes and bassoons, which give a wonderfully sweet sound, and then piston horns, which are effectively natural horns with an added valve mechanism. They have a real fluidity of sound - able to play really softly but also capable of a brilliant, focussed fortissimo which doesn't saturate the orchestra in a way that a modern horn section can. And then the amazing F trumpets. The history of trumpet playing around this period is complicated, but Elgar himself wrote letters to trumpet players asking whether he should score them in B flat or F, or in one case even in E flat. So it's absolutely clear: if Elgar writes for F trumpets, with their much-admired nobility of tone, he wants F trumpets, and if he writes for B flat trumpets, as he does in the symphonies, he wants B flat!

The trombones were fairly standard narrow-bore instruments (colloquially known as pea-shooters!). We actually played Elgar's own tenor trombone, and a tuba designed by Harry Barlow, one of the most famous tuba players in Britain at that time. We all felt it was a tremendously exciting experience to go where the instruments took us. I would love to do the symphonies with period instruments; you would hear things that are extraordinary. It really makes you understand what a fantastic orchestrator Elgar is: like Britten, he had an incredible understanding of the colours of his instruments.

I'm glad you mentioned the orchestration: I was immediately struck by the very beginning of the Prelude, and how much of a difference the woodwind doublings make to the colour of the lines, especially the sweet tone of the Goossens oboe.

Well, it helps that we had one of the world's greatest oboists playing it, Nick Daniel, who is a good friend of mine and who commits to these projects with so much love. And yes, those unisons at the beginning are so scary: there's nowhere to hide! We also thought long and hard about vibrato and portamento. I listened to an awful lot of historic recordings, and there is occasionally more 'lazy sliding' than we would hear today in a modern orchestra, but it was always very much a matter of taste and fashion: some orchestras did it, many didn't. What's interesting is a lot of the portamenti happen naturally when they work within the fingering patterns of the instruments, but not when they involve string crossings or uncomfortable fingerings. So we trod a fairly chaste line - I didn't want it to become an obsession. Likewise with vibrato, one of the things we talked about was using it ornamentally; we seemed to fall quite naturally into a style that we felt works for the music.

Moving to the singers, I must mention the extraordinary clarity of diction, not only in the chorus but also particularly Nicky Spence as Gerontius, who is tremendous in his delivery of text.

Any singer I've worked with will tell you that I'm obsessed with text. I work choirs incredibly hard on diction, vowel colours and consonants, all the technical stuff, because I think there is a temptation with big choirs that they become a bit shouty. For this recording we incorporated a large group of young people, and we did six hours of the most intense rehearsal I think I've ever done. We went into those sessions absolutely ready to find everything that was there. There's always more one can get, but, if I'm allowed to say so, I do think the choruses sound as good as you'll hear on disc in terms of the connection with text: you can hear every single consonant when you need to, even in the Demons' Chorus, which incidentally I will not do with silly voices! The music is so fantastic, and so descriptive, it doesn't need that.

With a singer of the calibre of Nicky, and one who sings with such intelligence, there are sometimes legitimate disagreements as to how a word might be coloured within a phrase, and that's fine. We talked a lot about the emotional truth of a line. I think sometimes singers do need to be reminded about context: what is the overall feeling at that point? I think Nicky sings the role magnificently. I hope we do this piece again together, and I'm sure there will always be discussions and things will change, but it's a joy to work with such profoundly good singers. You have to give the singer a certain degree of discretion, you can't micromanage the way they sing every note, even if one is tempted to! A singer has to feel the emotion themselves, they can't feel it just because the conductor has told them to.

Did you extend the period aspect of your recording to the style of choral singing that you requested?

To answer your question bluntly, no! I couldn't see anything that would be advantageous in trying to recreate stylistic mannerisms of that period. If you look at, for example, the first twelve singers of Gerontius or the Angel, there is such a variety of singing styles within those artists that I didn't find anything uniform that would be a fundamental feature of the music. I use period instruments and a huge amount of historical analysis to present what I hope is an entirely contemporary performance. Otherwise, I would be trying to replicate every tempo mark and every tempo change. So I think we just have to be ourselves. The obsession with finding historical connections probably tells us more about our century than it does about the nineteenth/twentieth. Because I'm not conducting this repertoire every week with modern symphony orchestras, I have a lot of time to think about it, and that's actually my strongest calling card. It's about creating something which feels like a personal statement, embracing the historical side and then getting away from it, but finding the core of the musical work. The historical research is part of the preparation, it's not really part of the performance.

You mentioned the young people who were involved through the Gabrieli Roar partnership, which is clearly very important to you: what does that mean to them to participate in something so huge?

I am passionate about trying to change the narrative that young people cannot connect with classical music. Classical music and particularly choral music are, whether we like it or not, very much inhabited by those of a certain upper middle-class background. That's how it works, and it's not to be horrible about the people who are involved in it, they're often wonderful people, but I want to change that. I had kids in that choir who've never done anything like this, from Corby, from Saltburn, from coastal Lincolnshire, places that are not hotbeds of choral music - to put it mildly. The other thing I'm passionate about is there is no reason with proper training why you can't incorporate young people into the professional environment. Young people love being treated as adults. They want challenges, they want to climb a mountain, not do something patronising and unexciting. And that's what we're continuing to do with the Roar Project.

There is a huge potential out there for connecting young people and the broader community into professional music-making. It's absolutely the most important thing I feel I can do with whatever time is left, because the truth is every young person in the world should have exposure to culture and music. The sad thing is that, although of course there are fantastic state schools, the overall level of music provision is woefully low, and we have to change that. It's not about creating professional musicians for the future, that will happen as a by-product, but about creating a core of music lovers who will be really connected with this great art.