It hardly seems fifty years since the War Requiem made
its impact in Coventry Cathedral. It was under the direction
of Meredith Davies and not of Benjamin Britten himself, who
had at a late stage decided to hand over the baton to his assistant
in preparing for the Great Day. Composed to celebrate the opening
of the new Coventry Cathedral which abutted and replaced the
war-ravaged shell of its predecessor, it was the work by which
Britten thought he would be longest remembered. Plenty of his
other music is still going strong - Hyperion have just issued
their second recording of A Ceremony of Carols and St
Nicolas - but by my reckoning he was right to expect that
it would be the War Requiem that would maintain his reputation.
The reel-to-reel recording that I made at the time has long
crumbled into a pile of dust and rust and even the Latin Requiem
has been supplanted but the work itself is still going strong.
At the time I didn’t know much of Britten’s music;
the Young Person’s Guide and a performance of Peter
Grimes that had made me begin to realise that there was
a great deal more to this composer were about all that I knew.
Not only is the music a powerful statement of regret at the
folly of war and the hope of something better, it also helped
to place the poetry of First World War poet Wilfred Owen before
a wider public. It’s easy to forget how little known that
poetry was in 1962 - though I was reading English at Oxford
at the time, Owen had barely impinged on my consciousness; since
then I’ve lost count of the number of exam scripts that
I marked over the years which did greater or lesser justice
to Owen’s poetry. The nadir must be the candidate who
averred that the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon was preferable
because Sassoon had died in the war, while Owen didn’t
know what it was like to die in battle - actually it’s
the other way round but the assumption that you have to be dead
to write poetry about war opens up a whole new school of criticism.
Britten’s hope of having an international cast of soloists
was disappointed at a late stage when the Soviet authorities
refused to allow Galina Vishnevskaya to take part in a ‘political’
work - and one with religious connotations at that. Heather
Harper had to step in at the last moment. The plan of having
representatives from formerly warring nations was, however,
maintained by the presence of Peter Pears as the tenor soloist
and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as the baritone.
That international dimension is repeated for this performance,
again in Coventry Cathedral to commemorate the half-century
of the event. The sense of occasion could never be repeated,
but it’s clear from this recording that this was an event
in its own right. John Quinn was fortunate enough to be there;
you can find his appreciative review on Seen and Heard here
and it’s clear from what he writes that the live performance
was even more impressive than the recording could convey.
There’s a choice of recordings now but, inevitably, the
1963 version which Britten himself made for Decca is the elephant
in the room for any subsequent performance or recording. It’s
been very well re-mastered for Decca Originals on 475 7511 (see
review).
It enshrines the original concept in having Galina Vishnevskaya
in the soprano role and it comes with the bonus of a long rehearsal
sequence. The new recording comes close in many respects to
challenging it and exceeds it in one important respect in that
it allows us to see as well as hear the mighty forces involved.
Not the least of the benefits of the video is seeing the sun
set behind the ruins of the old cathedral as the floodlights
come on.
For this performance the soprano has been elevated above the
other soloists and stands with the choir, while tenor and baritone
are together - appropriately since they often duet, especially
in the moving final setting of Strange Meeting. Of the
three it’s Mark Padmore who deserves to be mentioned first,
but the others are not far behind. As a reminder of Padmore’s
versatility, I’ve just been listening to him making an
excellent job of the haute-contre role in Rameau’s
Zoroastre, recently reissued by Warner/Erato. Here he
is starring in a quite different part.
As John Quinn writes, he is simply outstanding. Britten wrote
this and all his mature tenor parts with the voice of Peter
Pears in mind, but I know that I’m not alone in having
problems with Pears’ timbre. No such problems with Mark
Padmore.
Erin Wall projects the soprano part extremely well; at times
I thought the close-up of her facial expressions a trifle off-putting
but they demonstrate how thoroughly she gets ‘into’
the meaning of the music. She has none of the Slavic wobble
of Vishnevskaya, all too apparent in the latter’s singing
of Sanctus.
My only reservation about Hanno Müller-Brachmann in the
baritone part is his inability to make his words heard - so
important in the poems. It’s apparently not because English
is not his first language, since his pronunciation is excellent
when he can be heard. John Quinn seems not to have had a problem
with his diction; maybe actually being there made the difference.
All reservations disappear when hearing that final duet where
Padmore and Müller-Brachmann assume the roles of the doppelgänger
in Owen’s poem; their voices even sound like opposite
sides of the same coin.
Orchestra and choirs played their parts admirably but the overall
accolade - man of the match, as it were - must go to Andris
Nelsons for the wonderful way in which he holds the whole thing
together. I’ve used the word ‘power’ several
times but Nelson reminds us that there are moments when the
War Requiem rivals the repose of the Fauré Requiem
as well as the power of Verdi. Even if the master tapes and
all copies of every other performance were to crumble as my
reel-to-reel tape of that first performance did, this 50th-anniversay
recording would still provide us with a wonderful opportunity
to see and hear Britten’s masterpiece.
The recorded sound is very good. It demands something altogether
grander than television speakers but it sounds excellent via
the Cambridge Audio 651BD linked to my audio system. I imagine
that it sounds even better in surround sound - I’ve yet
to be persuaded into that area but I imagine that this would
be the ideal argument for it, with the children’s choir
physically separated from the main forces at the opposite end
of the cathedral. The dynamic range is verging on the painful
for domestic listening; if you set the volume to hear the opening
Requiem the climaxes are close to uncomfortable. Part
of the problem is that the really quiet choral parts tend to
get lost in the acoustic more than the orchestra, as a result
of which the balance between the two becomes uneven. With the
multitude of microphones in evidence, perhaps the engineers
could have done something to remedy this. Certainly I hear the
male voices sing requiem æternam more clearly even
on an mp3 download of the Decca recording than I do on this
new blu-ray.
I don’t want to make too much of this, however; as John
Quinn wrote in his review of the live concert, we now know the
work so well that we are able mentally to fill in the bits that
we don’t quite hear. He wondered whether those less favourably
placed than he was would have heard Erin Wall clearly from her
place above the other soloists; if they did have problems, they
are not apparent from the recording.
The picture is crystal-clear. Even on a modest-sized screen
the advantage of blu-ray over DVD is evident and the sound in
that format is superior both to its older video competitor and
to CD. I wonder how long the recording companies will continue
to provide both video formats; at some stage they must inevitably
decide that, as blu-ray players are backwards-compatible with
DVD discs, that will become the only format, just as mono LPs
were jettisoned. Blu-ray cases are also a more sensible size
and shape.
Andris Nelsons slowly composes himself at the end of the music
and there’s a huge pause before the well-deserved applause
finally comes. Audience and performers alike must have been
emotionally drained, such is the power of this performance.
Don’t throw away Britten’s own recording on Decca
- I simply had to play that recording all through the next day
- but you must have this, too.
Brian Wilson
see also review of DVD release by John
Quinn (November 2012 Recording of the Month)
War
Requiem discography & review index
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Erin Wall (soprano); Mark Padmore (tenor); Hanno Müller-Brachmann
(baritone) 
108070 [97:00] 