Credits:

London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus / Davis, Colin

Description:

English conductor Colin Davis turned to the music of Edward Elgar only late in his career. One can easily understand why. When he first made his name in the early ’60s, Davis was known as a brilliant Mozart conductor, an insightful Stravinsky conductor, and an inspired Tippett conductor. But while he later also became a noted Sibelius, Haydn, and even Dvorak conductor, Davis almost entirely stayed away from the directly emotional Romanticism of Elgar until the early years of the twenty first century. Then, in quick succession, he conducted and recorded all three of Elgar’s symphonies and his oratorio The Dream of Gerontius with the London Symphony, and amazingly enough, every performance was just about as good as it gets. In this 2005 recording of The Dream, Davis takes a work lovingly encrusted with a thick coat of English sentimentality and blasts it into