Elgar’s The Apostles, which brought to an end The Three Choirs Festival on Saturday night, is a curious piece. There’s none of the spit and spite of Bach’s Passions, nor the gut-wrenching drama and horror of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast. If anything, The Apostles is a paean, a panegyric even, so single-minded in the certainty of its final destination that it permeates every moment of the work. One might almost call it a 100-minute happy ending.
This doesn’t give the conductor, soloists, choir or orchestra much wiggle room, which perhaps explains why the performance seemed so impersonal. Having said that, the Prologue is a notable exception: here, for a few brief moments there are no limits. In hindsight this was the most exhilarating music of the evening, Adrian Partington and the Philharmonia articulating its gorgeous hush as a mysterious, slightly plangent music, searching, with an endless sense of scope.
Is it a red herring, or simply Elgar providing divine context for the work’s subsequent mortal focus? Either way, from the entry of the choir there was a demonstrable sense of narrowing, in which that teasing glimpse of infinity was transformed into a well-defined, decidedly limited frame of reference. Furthermore, while Elgar could never be accused of being too energetic in The Apostles, Partington’s choice to make the Prologue slow and drifting had the adverse effect of making it sound soporific. This extended into the following sections, such that they often seemed to be less about recounting events than vaguely recalling a dream.
It fell to the soloists to bring some concision to the concert. Tenor Michael Bell, as Narrator, was helpfully clear and to the point, while Martha McLorinan, though a little hard to hear at first, assumed considerable stature throughout the work. Most compelling was John Savournin’s take on Judas. While the role is less prominent than that of John and Peter, at times Elgar makes both the words and their placement seem dislocated, out of sync and out of joint with everything and everybody else. Savournin shaped these moments beautifully, and in the Second Part gave a powerful mouthpiece to Judas in his lengthy final soliloquy, despite Elgar’s unwillingness to support the words with anything approximating melancholy or anguish.
He also stood apart inasmuch as he seemed to be the only soloist actually attempting to inject real emotion into his performance. As already noted, Elgar’s music to a large extent seems to be attempting to exist outside notions of drama or emotion, being as it is so utterly focused on the fait accompli glory that impels and underpins everything. (In this respect, he’s like a forerunner of John Tavener, who would take the same approach a century later.) This was reflected in a surprisingly neutral mode of expression from the soloists, especially Dingle Yandell in the role of Jesus, who seemed to be aiming for something elevated but ended up just sounding disinterested, as if he had better things to be doing.
There was no doubting the enthusiasm and, at their height, power of the Festival Chorus, who could hardly have sounded more excited and cogent at the times when Elgar allows them to finally let rip. Likewise the Philharmonia, articulating the work’s candied accompaniment with unceasing, all-enveloping lushness. Yet one came away with the impression of a performance that sought to preach to the converted, filled with unthinking acceptance, a kind of blank, pseudo-spiritual done deal where there was nothing for us to do but meekly accept its wash after wash of pious opulence.
