What a musical scorcher! Last night Harlow Chorus treated us to an Elijah of a lifetime – reawakening with drama and passion Felix Mendelssohn’s pageant of fire, tempest and triumph. It was the most thrilling and musically perfect end to this year’s Thaxted Festival.

The combined forces of Harlow Chorus, Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra and top flight soloists under the baton of Sarah Tenant-Flowers drove new life into this much-loved work. The performance was richly underpinned by William Berger’s magnificent Elijah (bass), with Rebecca von Lipinski (soprano), Julia Riley (alto) and Nathan Vale (tenor) all rising to wonderful effect at each occasion. All these young singers matched their voices perfectly to the emotions and passions in the solos, and blended in expert harmony for duets, trios and quartets. The Brandenburg Symphony Orchestra provided terrific (and sometimes terrifying!) accompaniment throughout, up to the high standard we have come to expect from Julian Leaper and his band.

Harlow Chorus responded to Sarah Tenant-Flowers’ musical direction by bringing Elijah’s choruses newly alive.

 In Part One they sang of anguish at the drought, gave passionate cries for help, expressed joy and thankfulness at renewed faith and described the eventual raging of the storm. Reflecting the Biblical drought, temperatures in Thaxted had soared, but the audience’s engagement with the story was such that we expected the heavens literally to have opened as we left the church at the interval!

Part Two contains some wonderful contrasting choruses – telling of quiet faith, of earthquakes, fire, Elijah’s flight to heaven – all magnificently rendered by Harlow Chorus. The work’s joyful final chorus was matched by the audience response. Our emotions had been wrung through, we’d struggled from turmoil to triumph, survival against the odds.

After the Birmingham première of the work in 1846, The Times said “Never was there a more complete triumph – never a more complete thorough and speedy recognition of a great work of art.” One hundred and sixty years later Harlow Chorus have proved it is still so!

David Samuels