Vaughan Williams’s millennarian oratorio Sancta Civitas is the kind of large and neglected piece that the Proms exist for. Premiered in Oxford in 1926 to texts drawn from the Book of Revelation, it might have been written for the Albert Hall. The work calls for huge vocal forces, an organ and a distant boys choir, tenor and trumpet, here performing high in the gallery under the roof. And since Sir Mark Elder is a great organiser and advocate of such demanding large-scale rarities, these were near ideal conditions for the Hallé players and singers to make the case for this important piece.
They succeeded impressively, despite Vaughan Williams’s occasionally earthbound choral writing and the apocalyptic texts, which make for uncomfortable listening in an era of terrorism. That apart, Sancta Civitas is an expertly structured work, illuminated by haunting and successful orchestral writing, all meticulously marshalled by Elder and idiomatically played by the Hallé principals. Iain Paterson travelled from Bayreuth to sing the visionary text with sympathetic baritonal warmth, while the ending, in which tenor Robin Tritschler brought a jolt of energy from on high, was beautifully managed.
Elder and the Hallé had begun with Debussy’s Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune, with Adam Walker weighting western music’s most groundbreaking flute solo to perfection and Elder allowing the pace to ebb and flow without ever losing control of the work’s beguiling tension. After the interval, Elder underscored the seriousness of his approach with a very modern reading of Elgar’s Second Symphony, emphasising the work’s episodic angularity and harmonic unease at every turn. The darker side of the opening movement and the rondo are widely admired nowadays, but Elder caught the essential fragility of the final movement, too, so that the symphony felt almost Brucknerian in its search for a settled ending that the material and mood can never quite permit.
- Available to listen again on iPlayer for 30 days. The Proms continue until 12 September.
