This recording of Elgar’s King Olaf on Chandos comes no less than 28 years after the first (conducted by Vernon Handley) on EMI. It is an unjustly neglected setting of words adapted (with the help of his friend Acland) from Longfellow’s Tales of a Wayside Inn, in which ‘The Musician’ (in reality Longfellow’s Norwegian friend and musician Ole Bull) recounts the tale of Olaf Tryggvason, the Norwegian king, nationalist symbol and bringer (often forcefully) of Christianity to the Norse people. Here, under the experienced Elgarian hand of Sir Andrew Davis and the appropriate forces of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and three fine Norwegian choirs (with splendid diction and intonation), the sound quality is vibrant, clear and compelling, and does justice to the enthusiasm of Elgar’s score. The recording also brings together the American soprano Emily Birsan, Barry Banks (well known for his Italian bel canto repertoire) and Alan Opie, who confirm the quasi-operatic nature of the material in their vivid performances.

‘Early’ though this work may be regarded, it contains much of what we know of the composer’s first flush of maturity: majestic melodies, modal harmony with strong plagal inclinations, the prevalence of the march as a style-form and musical ideas shaped by brilliant orchestration and Wagnerian sequence. The work lacks, perhaps, the greater fertility of Caractacus and Gerontius but it is nevertheless full of vivid, stage-like picturesqueness, enhanced by the crispness of Davis’s stewardship. This is amply demonstrated in Banks’s theatrical portrayal of ‘King Olaf’s Return’, a vivid scena, the dramatic exchanges between Olaf and the resistant Ironbeard, robustly played by Opie, and the more Wagnerian love scene between Olaf and Gudrun. The contribution of the chorus, who can barely be faulted for their sense of ensemble and balance, has a persuasive vitality in its role as both narrator and turba (especially in ‘The Wraith of Odin’, ‘Thyri’, ‘The Death of Olaf’ and the well-known ‘As torrents in summer’ in the Epilogue), a quality which brings merit to the otherwise musically weaker The Banner of St George. For devotees of Elgar and of English choral music of the late Victorian era, this pulsating recording has all those emotional attributes that make the heart beat faster.