Turn up the volume on this wartime yarn of death and Elgar ★★★

But now installed Guthrie scours a hospital of war-wounded, the local pub and the bakery. Young men yet to be conscripted into the war are found and join the choir’s women and elders to perform a forthcoming concert. However, with all the preferred composers being born in enemy territory – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn, a Jew to boot – who to sing?

Guthrie thinks of his acquaintance Elgar and the English composer’s lesser known (than Land of Hope and Glory) oratorio The Dream of Gerontius.

The piece is about the death of a devout old man whose soul rises to heaven. But with the reality of war now eroding the patriotic fervour with which families waved their sons to the front, it is decided to stage the work as a war piece with the old man played by one of the town’s returning wounded sons.

The film argues that stricken communities can be healed by performative art, which is no surprise given the creative team. Yet there is no real dilemma or tension at its heart, even when Simon Russell Beale’s Elgar turns up to at first encourage and then vehemently oppose Guthrie’s “modernised” version of the piece.

The decency of Allam’s pompous Duxbury, who is himself quietly grieving for a lost son, takes his demotion from principal singer in his stride, even though as the local bigwig he is bankrolling the performance.

Fiennes is eminently watchable, yet even his character lacks depth. The loss of his German love, who we learn was on a German warship when it was sunk, feels like a thinly drawn add-on.

The music is gorgeously realised by a director who deployed Handel to heart-stopping effect in The Madness of King George. It’s all quietly moving but, as they sometimes say in cowboy films, too quiet.

The Choral

Cert 12a