Elgar’s choral masterpiece
Firmly rooted in the belief that The Kingdom is the greatest of Elgar’s oratorios, David Temple, Music Director of Crouch End Festival Chorus and Hertfordshire Chorus, has long been a champion of the work. With its beautiful, gentle conversational sections, astonishing dramatic passages, iridescent colours and some of Elgar’s finest orchestral writing, Temple believes that ‘it is a gem from the first note to the last’.
The two choirs, under Temple, will join forces with soloists Francesca Chiejina, Dame Sarah Connolly, Benjamin Hulett and James Platt for a performance at the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall on Thursday 29 January 2026. The concert celebrates Temple’s landmark and highly praised recording of The Kingdom released earlier this year by Signum Records. Hailed as ‘one of the finest recordings in recent years’ (David Mellor, Mail on Sunday) and ‘an excitingly cogent and hugely committed account’ by Andrew Achenbach in Gramophone where it was also an Editor’s Choice, the Elgar Society declared, ‘I’m with David Temple (and before him Adrian Boult) that The Kingdom is Elgar’s finest choral work … a 5 star experience’. Fifteen years earlier, in 2010, the Elgar Society said of his concert with Hertfordshire Chorus in St Albans Cathedral, ‘Put simply, it was the finest performance of The Kingdom that I have ever heard, or can ever hope to hear’.
Elgar was commissioned to write The Kingdom by the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival for its 1906 edition following the success of The Dream of Gerontius and The Apostles. Conceived as part of a trilogy of oratorios (though he only completed two), The Kingdom continues the narrative first started in The Apostles. Elgar focuses on the lives of Jesus’s disciples, in particular on Peter, John, Mary the Virgin and Mary Magdalene, in the first few days after the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and on the work of the early church community. Jesus and his followers are portrayed as down-to-earth ordinary men and women who encounter extraordinary events.
Performance details: Thursday 29 January 2026, 7.30pm Elgar, The Kingdom, Royal Festival Hall, Southbank Centre, London SE1 8XX.
Tickets from £12 – available here or from the box office on 020 3879 9555.