Elgar’s The Music Makers and Poulenc’s Gloria

20 June 2026

In last Saturday’s concert SMS and soloists Jessica Gillingwater and Lucy Cox were accompanied by a guest orchestra led by Naomi Rump and conducted by John Challenger. Elgar thought The Music Makers one of his best works. It was also one of his last. It has a nostalgic feeling to it as if the composer was looking back over a career that he thought almost over – which, perhaps, explains the number of self-quotations in it. In the Nimrod and the First Symphony references it is hard not to see a man looking back on past triumphs that he does not expect to repeat. Of course, there were still the Cello Concerto and a handful of chamber works to come, but The Music Makers, composed just two years before the outbreak of the First World War, seems self-consciously to mark the end of an era.

After the orchestral introduction, the choir entered with ‘We are the music makers, we are the dreamers of dreams’. This was beautifully and — dare I say? – dreamily done. On the whole I felt that the quiet passages throughout the work were the most impressive parts, not least because in them choir and orchestra were in a satisfactory balance. There were thrilling fortissimo moments, too, as in ‘a dream that is coming to birth’, which soared above the orchestra and, on some occasions, managed to compete with the brass. The long choral crescendo over the tune of Nimrod was another exciting moment, as was the passage that is accompanied by the theme from the First Symphony and which dies away into shimmering strings.

The problem facing any performance of The Music Makers is the text. Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s words do not lend themselves readily to musical setting. There are too many of them — this wouldn’t be such a problem if they constituted a narrative, but they don’t — and, to a modern audience, too many of them are simply embarrassing. (There are times when his music makers, who are meant to represent artists in general, sound more like empire builders such as Cecil Rhodes.) Despite this, SMS’s performance carried conviction and would have won converts to Elgar, if anyone needed to be converted, though not perhaps to Arthur O’ Shaughnessy. Though to be fair to him, the phrase ‘movers and shakers’, now in everyday use, originates in this poem.

The text of the Poulenc Gloria is less problematic. In this work, the choir’s diction was clearer, as was the balance of voices and instruments. ‘Domine fili unigenite’ and ‘Qui sedes ad dexteram patris’ were sung with great confidence, and in the movements with Lucy Cox, the soprano soloist, the choir was effective in its accompanying role. Poulenc’s Gloria is an uplifting work and the audience went home, I hope, duly uplifted. It was such a pity, therefore, that there were so few of them. Both works deserved a bigger turnout. Neither the weather nor the World Cup (England were not playing on Saturday) were to blame, so perhaps it was the relative unfamiliarity of the works that kept people away.

Stephen Lycett
Reviewer