The Dream of Gerontius

Grade: A– There’s a species of music-lover who enjoys pointing out that Elgar isn’t played much on the Continent – the musical equivalent of those social media bores who pop up each April to reveal that Saint George was Turkish, ackshully. It’s all rot, of course. Some of the best Elgar performances of recent years have come from Barenboim and Petrenko in Berlin; and, after all, it was Richard Strauss in Düsseldorf who put The Dream of Gerontius on the map.  And now here’s Gerontius from Helsinki. True, the conductor, Nicholas Collon, is British and I hadn’t previously had him down as an Elgarian. The choirs are a mixture of