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WOKINGHAM Choral Society with the Brandenburg Sinfonia, under the
gifted baton of Aidan Oliver, gave a memorable performance of
Mendelssohn's Elijah. Written for the Birmingham Musical Festival
in 1846, only a year before Mendelssohn's death at the age of 38, the
work was an immediate success. It was long considered second only to the
Messiah in the oratorio repertoire. Later it suffered somewhat of
an eclipse from which perhaps it is still worthily emerging.
As Saturday's performance showed, Elijah is a work of enormous
excitement and dramatic force; the powerful first part contrasting with
a number of more gentle sequences in the second.
Mendelssohn was greatly influenced by Bach and Handel and this was
apparent in He That Shall Endure to the End and Is Not His
Word Like a Fire. However his own musical personality pervades the
whole, imbuing it with deceptively simple elegance.
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As always, the soloists for this concert, Rachel Nicholls (soprano),
Doreen Curran (mezzo-soprano), Daniel Norman (tenor) and Sam Landman
(treble) were excellent. The foundations of a great performance rest
with the title role and the chorus of Israelites. As Elijah, Andrew
Foster- Williams was truly outstanding, turning tauntingly on to the
Israelites and away from the audience to challenge their worship of Baal
in Call Him Louder, and conveying poignant changes of mood in Lord
God of Abraham and It Is Enough.
The response of the chorus to their self-inflicted woes captured every
nuance of their emotional turmoil and the semi-chorus sang with winsome
sensitivity.
The concert was dedicated to Denny Lister, accompanist to the choir
since 1994, who sadly died last year after a short illness.
Robin Eaglen
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