Sunday 7 April 2019 – 7.30pm
The Dream of Gerontius - Edward Elgar
The great classic of English choral music returns to St John’s Church after a 12-year gap, with a superb line-up of soloists:
Adrian Thompson (Gerontius)
Kathryn Rudge (The Angel)
David Shipley (Angel of the Agony)
Cardinal Newman's poem The Dream of Gerontius was well known to Edward Elgar, indeed, he received an annotated copy of it as a wedding present in 1889. When, a decade later, he was commissioned to write an oratorio for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, he eventually settled on this text and proceeded to compose a work that was to establish his reputation.
At the end of the manuscript score, Elgar wrote this quotation from John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies:
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This is the best of me; for the rest, I ate, and drank, and slept, loved and hated, like another: my life was as the vapour and is not; but this I saw and knew; this, if anything of mine, is worth your memory.
Tickets: £13.50 available from:
Buxton Opera House Box Office: 0845 127 2190 or 01298 72190 or book online: buxtonoperahouse.org.uk
Tickets are also available in advance from Society members (50p discount) and on the door before each concert in St John’s Church (limited availability)
