A Mass of Life review – magical and ecstatic Proms performance of Delius’s magnum opus

Royal Albert Hall, LondonMark Elder and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make such an outstanding case for Delius’s setting of Nietzsche that its 37-year absence from the Proms is bafflingIt is 37 years since A Mass of Life was last done at the Proms, and that 1988 outing was only the second complete Prom

Royal Albert Hall, London
Mark Elder and the BBC Symphony Orchestra make such an outstanding case for Delius’s setting of Nietzsche that its 37-year absence from the Proms is baffling

It is 37 years since A Mass of Life was last done at the Proms, and that 1988 outing was only the second complete Proms performance. The neglect is barely credible, and this outstanding occasion showed what audiences have been denied. If ever there was a piece ideally suited to the Royal Albert Hall it is Delius’s voluptuous 1905 magnum opus, with its double chorus, vast and sensuous orchestration, and the ecstatic affirmations of its Nietzsche text. And no conductor is more ideally suited to bringing all this together than the lifelong Delius advocate Mark Elder.

Why the disregard? Partly, perhaps, the enduring boldness of Nietzsche’s atheist polemic Also Sprach Zarathustra, from which the text is culled. The main reason, though, is surely that Delius’s defiantly individual aesthetic – “a little intangible sometimes but always very beautiful”, as Elgar, no less, put it so well – remains a hard sell to audiences who want their music to have more obvious structure and progression.