Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius is very well served on record but a new version with good soloists may still be worth a look.  And there is a new one on the Ondine label featuring Christine Rice, John Findon and Rod Williams.  There’s a rather staggering collection of choirs; the Helsinki Music Centre Choir, the Cambridge University Symphony Chorus, Dominante | Helsinki Chamber Choir and the
Alumni of the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge.  All this plus the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Nicholas Collon.

The soloists are all really good and their diction is excellent although maybe Findon is sounding just a bit stressed by the end of this challenging work (it’s a live recording).  The choirs mesh nicely and the orchestra sounds suitably grand, with impressive brass, where it needs to.  All up, it’s  very good performance.  It needs to be given the competition.

My reservations are largely about the recording which was made at the Helsinki Music Centre in 2024.  I listened to CD quality digital and I had two issues.  Especially in the Prelude I thought the orchestra sounded a bit muddy.  Not horribly so but not as clear as the best contemporary orchestral records.  Now there is also a 96kHz/24 bit cut which one might reasonably expect to be better in that respect.  On top of that the soloists are balanced unrealistically far forward.  Of course, all recordings amp up the soloists but this one seems a bit extreme.  Anyway, it’s available as a double CD, as MP3 and as FLAC/ALAC/WAV in the two previously mentioned resolutions.  There’s a booklet with full texts.  There’s nothing but the Elgar piece on the recording which is a bit niggardly by modern standards for a two disc set.  Most of the competition come wth extras.

And speaking of competition there’s a lot of it, going back to a recent remaster of the 1945 Sargent recording originally issued on 78s.  There are other notable versions from Boult, Britten, Barbirolli, Barenboim and Davis among others.  If I had to choose one I might go with Sir Andrew Davis.  I haven’t heard the recording but I have heard Sir Andrew conduct the piece live.  He has superb soloists and the recording is available from Chandos in SACD format which tends to show its (considerable) best in large scale works like this.  If you do go for this new Finnish one I’d definitely go for the hi-res version!

Catalogue information: Ondine Records ODE14512D (due for release on Feb 7th 2025).