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E-mailConductor leads 'Dream' session with Pittsburgh Symphony
Conductor Sir Andrew Davis
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
What: "The Dream of Gerontius" by Edward Elgar. Sir Andrew Davis, conductor.
With: Michelle DeYoung, Marcus Haddock, Alan Held, Mendelssohn Choir.
When: 8 p.m. Friday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday.
Admission: $17.50 to $69.50.
Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown.
Details: 412-392-4900 or the Web site.
Mark Kanny is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's classical music critic and can be reached at 412-320-7877 or via e-mail.
This weekend, Sir Andrew Davis returns to the Heinz Hall to lead the first Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performances of "The Dream of Gerontius," a creation that composer Edward Elgar called "the best of me."
Elgar is most widely known for the middle section of one of his "Pomp and Circumstance" marches that is so often used at school graduations. His artistically more ambitious pieces -- symphonies, concerti and others such as the "Enigma" Variations -- are performed at concerts all over the world.
Elgar's early interest in Cardinal John Newman's poem "The Dream of Gerontius" was rekindled when a friend gave him a copy as a wedding gift in 1889. Gerontius is a man, not priest or a saint, the Catholic Elgar emphasized. The death bed scene in Part One and the dream of afterlife in Part Two are "profoundly based in Catholic faith and doctrines," Davis says.
"You don't have to be a practicing Catholic to be moved by what the piece has to say," says the conductor, "just as you to don't have to be a Catholic to appreciate the 'Missa solemnis' by Ludwig van Beethoven."
Or, he might have added, the Requiem Masses by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Giuseppe Verdi.
Davis says he "grew up in a religious environment, although my parents were heavily Protestant and my father was not a fan of Catholic Church."
But when he heard Sir John Barbirolli, a hero to him, conduct "Gerontius" in London, he discovered what remains to this day one of his favorite choral pieces.
Davis loves the dramatic sweep of "The Dream of Gerontius."
"Elgar felt a great intensity of creativity during the whole period he was writing this," he says, adding that the composer said he was inspired by long walks in the woods communing with nature. "'Gerontius' has such a big sweep that the first half seems to be over in a flash."
The second part opens after death "in a dream world as the soul wakes up in his new surroundings to the most disembodied music one can think of, with muted strings," says the conductor, relishing sounds he'll soon create with symphony musicians.
He doesn't think "anyone in the whole English choral tradition had attempted to write anything as hair-raising as the Demon's Chorus, a dramatic highpoint. 'Gerontius' is very difficult for the chorus and was famously a mess at the premiere. But it hadn't been well prepared and was a success soon after at other performances in England and Germany."
Yet it is the ending, when simplicity reigns, that leads Davis to quote the poetry.
"It is one of his most inspired creations, as the Angel welcomes Gerontius singing:
Softly and gently, dearly-ransomed soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee.
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