Top oratorio-mongering: Elijah, at the Barbican, reviewed

As a young music critic, Bernard Shaw poked fun at anyone who thought Mendelssohn was a genius. Shaw conceded that Mendelssohn was capable of touching tenderness and refinement and sometimes ‘nobility and pure fire’, but his music was marred by kid-glove gentility, conventional sentimentality and – worst of all – ‘despicable oratorio-mongering’. Shaw’s pet hate was St Paul, with its ‘Sunday-school sentimentalities and its music-school ornamentalities’. He was only slightly less catty about Mendelssohn’s other oratorio, Elijah. Although he acknowledged its ‘exquisite prettiness’, he concluded that its composer was ‘a wonder whilst he is flying; but when his wings fail him, he walks like a parrot’.

Now the pendulum has swung, but not all the way. Elijah is acclaimed for the monumental sweep of the choruses, the exquisite woodwind sonorities – it was written soon after the incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream – and some sweet melodies.