Recording of the Week, Delius's A Mass of Life from Sir Mark Elder and the Bergen Philharmonic

Delius’s A Mass of Life is a strange beast. Composed after he fell under the spell of Nietzsche’s writings during a trip to Norway, it sets passages from Also sprach Zarathustra (which had also recently inspired Mahler and Strauss) to music which bears the imprint of the composer’s time in America, Paris and Germany, and makes formidable demands on the performers in terms of both stamina and harmonic language. But when those demands are fully met, it can make an immediate and unforgettable impact on its audience.

Completed in 1905 and premiered in full by Sir Thomas Beecham four years later, the work remains a relative rarity in concert and isn’t especially well-represented on disc: Beecham’s own recording and Sir Charles Groves’s account from 1971 have long since disappeared from the catalogue, although fine recordings from David Hill and Richard Hickox are both still available on Naxos and Chandos respectively.

But this superb new set from Bergen makes the strongest case for the piece imaginable, thanks to the irreproachable singing of the Edvard Grieg Kor and Collegium Musicum Choir (who deliver accuracy and athleticism in spades), Roderick Williams’s warmly sympathetic Zarathustra, and above all Elder’s masterly grasp on the architecture and detail of a score which can so easily seem sprawling and overblown.

Although Delius is a composer close to Elder’s heart, he’d never tackled A Mass of Life until initiating this project with the Bergen Philharmonic: the recording was made following two performances which marked the beginning of his tenure as the orchestra’s Principal Guest Conductor last September, and on the evidence here his connection with both score and orchestra was already firmly bedded in before the red light went on.

Elder’s deep love for this music shines through in every phrase, although he does have one misgiving. ‘The title is the one thing about the piece that’s a disaster!’ he fulminated on a video-call last week, explaining that it sets up false expectations about what is essentially ‘a humanistic work about the life-force’. And that life-force bursts forth with hair-raising impact in the exuberant opening bars, as the Edvard Grieg Kor and Collegium Musicum hit the ground running in the great choral hymn ‘O du mein Wille!’. Delius pushes his singers to near-Wagnerian extremes from the outset, but there’s never so much as a smidgen of strain or flagging energy-levels as the sopranos vault up to the first of many top Cs, and Elder’s control over the balance is such that neither diction nor expressivity are compromised.

Williams makes his first, instantly compelling appearance in the following movement – a lilting, rustic dance which to my ear tips the cap to Grieg, with a wealth of piquant woodwind and brass detail which emerges clear as day (Elder’s every decision on the balance front is supported by some beautifully-judged engineering). Zarathustra is a monster of a role which looks on the page as though it demands a voice of Wotan-esque proportions, but Elder ensures that Williams’s essentially lyric baritone never has to fight to be heard – and he brings real tender loving care to the more introspective sections, such as the gently ecstatic ‘Süße Leier!’ and the episode of hungover anxiety which besets Zarathustra upon awakening from a carousing-session.

The other three soloists are so ideally cast that I found myself wishing that Delius had given them a little more to do: Gemma Summerfield’s radiant soprano glows gently in the postscript to ‘O Mensch, gib acht!’ (Delius’s response to the text here being markedly different from Mahler’s approach a decade earlier), Claudia Huckle’s rich contralto brings real pathos to her wistful admonishment of the faithless Zarathustra, and homegrown tenor Bror Magnus Tødenes shines through quite beautifully in the ensembles.

With its whispers of the Good Friday Music from Parsifal (Delius had visited Bayreuth nine years earlier), the long closing section weaves its own peculiar spell: Williams is here at his most eloquent, and Elder’s pacing of the long diminuendo as the blazing final chorus ebbs away is a marvel. As we signed off our Zoom call, he confided that his guiding hope throughout the sessions was to ‘make new friends for Delius’s magnum opus’. He’s pulled it off with flying colours.