Never has Britten’s War Requiem been performed more powerfully

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★★★★★The final Wilfred Owen poem incorporated by Benjamin Britten into hisWar Requiem is Strange Meeting, with its shatteringly pessimistic line “None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress”. They were trekking from progress during the First World War, when Owen wrote those words, and during the Cold War when Britten composed the music. One can’t say that humanity has progressed much since then either.
That’s why this extraordinary hybrid work — mixing Catholic liturgy and pacifist poetry — will always be relevant and make an impact. But I can’t remember hearing it make so powerful an impact as it did in this stupendous Prom performance conducted by Antonio Pappano.
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Perhaps it takes a master opera conductor to bring together its disparate elements, so that rage is balanced by grief; the harsh martial fanfares by the disembodied chants of children and the tolling of funeral bells; and the thunder of drums, evoking Owen’s “monstrous anger of the guns”, by the eerie ghostliness in so much of Britten’s shadowy, tritone-saturated harmonies. At times you really felt that millions of victims were murmuring, or warning. from beyond the world of the living.
The London Symphony Orchestra played with phenomenal virtuosity, its chamber group carrying Owen’s poetry into an uncannily matching soundworld, while the main body of instrumentalists responded with pungent attack and precision to those moments where Britten audaciously reimagines the Dies irae as a judgment on warmongering nations. But just as effective was the superb singing of the London Symphony and BBC Symphony Choruses, moving from ethereal whispers to terrifying fortissimos, and particularly the impeccably trained Tiffin Boys’ Choir up in the gallery.
In the hall there were moments when the balances didn’t favour the soloists — the soprano Natalya Romaniw, hurling out her clarion-calls from below the organ, the eloquent baritone Will Liverman and the wonderfully expressive Allan Clayton. I’m sure they came across better on radio and TV.Available on BBC Sounds and iPlayer, bbc.co.uk
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