Age hangs over Elgar’s great oratorio The Dream of Gerontius from the beginning. An old man is facing death with faltering breath and a damp brow. Yet when this performance started our ears heard something new: Elgar stamped by period instruments and period habits of expression. The orchestral prelude wore beautiful dark velvet. Strings cradled selected notes in the portamento slide. Adrian Thompson’s Gerontius followed suit. Depending on the words and emotions, steady speeds occasionally trembled. This was no streamlined performance.

Usually, Elgar is out of reach of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; he’s too modern. But the benefits of “authenticity” were plain in the instruments’ clarity and light textures. Climaxes flared; the grime of ages was removed. There were benefits as well for Jeffrey Skidmore’s choir Ex Cathedra. Here was a big work and a big research project, something to sink throats into.

Yet for all the performance’s clarity and cleanliness, disappointments crept up. It would be unfair to criticise Thompson for not sounding “old”, or for throbbing with vibrato: his voice is his voice. But couldn’t he have given more personal colour to the spiritual voyager of Cardinal Newman’s text? A late replacement as the Angel, Susan Bickley sang like a tourist, giving the sights the once-over but not fully grasping their meaning. Both forgot about period details as the work advanced. Roderick Williams never bothered with them at all, though that didn’t stop his eloquence.

The evening’s biggest disappointment lay in Skidmore’s shaping of the score. We needed a firmer pair of hands that could go beyond engineering the roaring climaxes of Demons and Angelicals, and better penetrate those quieter spaces where Elgar’s heart lay most exposed. Even so, it’s worth catching. Further performances follow on Saturday and Sunday in Birmingham Town Hall, where Gerontius first breathed his last 109 years ago.

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