Composed for the consecration in 1962 of the new Coventry Cathedral — replacing the building destroyed by the Luftwaffe air raids of 1940 — Britten’s War Requiem is a passionate expression of the composer’s Left-leaning pacifistic convictions. Of that there has never been any doubt. What has come into focus in this Britten centenary year is the extent to which those convictions underpin Britten’s entire oeuvre. Paul Kildea’s controversial new biography persuasively articulates that viewpoint, while Tony Palmer’s latest film, Nocturne, makes powerful use of the War Requiem to evoke the dark, anguished preoccupations of Britten’s last decades.
This performance by LPO forces under Vladimir Jurowski (with Neville Creed conducting the chamber orchestra) honoured the composer’s wish for the Coventry premiere to feature a Russian soprano, a German baritone and an English tenor — a wish Britten was denied thanks to Cold War prohibitions. The contrasting contributions by the two male singers were high points of the performance. Ian Bostridge deployed his keening tenor tellingly to probe the elegiac quality of Wilfred Owen’s poetry; the white sound of non-vibrato was particularly effective invoking anger and bitterness. Matthias Goerne, on the other hand, boasts a velvety baritone which might have seemed ill-suited to the savagery of the work, yet deployed for lines such as “Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm”, it carried all the more emotional freight.
Evelina Dobraceva sailed effortlessly over the choral textures (the excellent London Philharmonic Choir) in her Lacrimosa. The offstage boys’ chorus (the equally admirable Trinity Boys Choir) is supposed to represent a distant, mystical world, but should it sound, as here, as though they are on the other side of the river?
Acoustic space was a problem generally: this work always sounds better in a cathedral. Here the brass and timpani failed to richochet round the hall and the ethereality of the chorus work was compromised by lack of resonance.
Bostridge and Goerne were eloquent as the enemy soldiers meeting after death. No less moving was the curtain-call embrace of the English and German singers following a protracted silence acknowledging the power of this timeless masterpiece.
