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Britten: War Requiem
Sunday, May 08, 2005
Royal Festival Hall,London
Christine Brewer (soprano)
Anthony Dean Griffey (tenor)
Gerald Finley (baritone)
London Philharmonic Choir
Tiffin Boys’ Choir
Chamber Ensemble (Neville Creed)
London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kurt Masur
Click the photo below for details of the recording
What the critics say
Rob Witts for classicalsource.com [excerpt]
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=2572
The LPO’s account was dignified and technically immaculate, the orchestra playing with its customary warm and unified sound; from the opening sepulchral chords of “Requiem aeternam”, the London Philharmonic Choir was accurate and assured, with the Tiffin Boys an incisive and characterful presence from the balcony. However, it was the superlative trio of soloists who really animated the performance: Anthony Dean Griffey’s plangent tenor was an excellent foil to Gerald Finley’s stentorian baritone, both fine actors bringing Wilfred Owens’s poetry to vivid, spitting life. Christine Brewer, stationed by the organ console, blazed with righteousness in the “Dies irae”. There was telling contrast between the fulsome ensemble sound of the Latin mass sections, and the spiky chamber orchestra that accompanies Owens’s poetry that Britten uses as an ironic gloss, which was set into the main orchestra stage-left and directed by Neville Creed.
Masur’s interpretation emphasised the work’s religious solemnity. What he missed were its emotional extremes: his conducting was too measured to convey the unhinged horror of battle in the “Dies irae”, and the choral crescendo in the “Sanctus” was stodgy rather than ecstatic. However, this was forgotten in the rapt conclusion, a vision of paradise almost within reach, the hall filled with voices striving upwards towards a less brutal world. The silence that followed the final “Amen” was long and deep.
Erica Jeal for The Guardian, May 11, 2005
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1480879,00.html
Rating: four out of five stars
Flag-waving celebrations may have been the order of the day across the river, but a far more thoughtful marking of the VE Day anniversary was to be found in the London Philharmonic's tribute, which almost inevitably took the form of Britten's War Requiem. What wasn't inevitable was that it should be led by the orchestra's chief conductor, who spent VE day as a teenage German soldier in an Allied prisoner-of-war camp. However, it seemed right that Kurt Masur was there.
Indeed, this was a performance of total conviction from all involved, especially the outstanding London Philharmonic Chorus, who sang beautifully and kept reserves in store for the terrifying, unfettered climaxes Masur demanded. The setting wasn't ideal: the Festival Hall is no cathedral, and occasionally Masur resorted to effects, closing off the choir's consonants at the ends of movements into a hum as if to conjure a church's echo. The voices of the Tiffin Boys' Choir floated the short distance from the back of the hall without sounding ethereal.
With the chamber orchestra on stage rather than in the faraway corner Britten imagined, Anthony Dean Griffey and Gerald Finley were sometimes pushed to get Wilfred Owen's poetry across, but it won through thanks to Finley's exemplary diction and the sheer power of Griffey's tenor. Christine Brewer was the luxuriously classy soprano soloist.
It is Britten's masterstroke that he puts the climax of the final movement near its beginning, only then bringing us to Owen's longest, most telling poem, describing a fallen soldier's encounter with the soul of the man he killed the day before. It's this final emphasis on individual experience that gives the work its powerful and unavoidable humanistic impact. Here, Finley's rich baritone, earlier just a little strained at the top, was beautifully, wrenchingly eloquent, Griffey's airy tenor just as much so.
At a time when national relationships consolidated by the second world war seem to lead to harm rather than good, their final words - "Let us sleep now" - have rarely sounded so compelling.
Barry Millington, Evening Standard, 19 May 2006
Rating: four stars ****
It is now more than 40 years since Britten's War Requiem first stunned an audience into silence. The premiere, in Coventry Cathedral in May 1962, with British and German soloists, was a memorable occasion for a generation recovering from the Second World War. Four decades on, the ever-present cloud of war still lends performances a special frisson, as when it was given by the London Philharmonic under Kurt Masur last May in the Royal Festival Hall. That occasion was captured for this recording and it brings together a fine soprano, Christine Brewer, poignant in the keening of her Lacrimosa, and baritone, Gerald Finley, equally eloquent in Bugles sang. Anthony Dean Griffey is of lighter weight as the tenor soloist, but the vocal and orchestral forces are skilfully held together by Masur.
Annette Morreau for the Independent, 10 May 2005
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article220847.ece
Rating: four out of five stars
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is to warn." The words are Wilfred Owen's, inscribed in the score of Britten's War Requiem.
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is to warn." The words are Wilfred Owen's, inscribed in the score of Britten's War Requiem. Britten's work is not performed often; the numbers required are a deterrent. But it is an irony that it takes the 60th anniversary of VE Day to bring out a 20th-century masterpiece whose message remains constantly relevant.
The London Philharmonic pulled out all the stops. Apart from the top soloists - Christine Brewer, Anthony Dean Griffey and Gerald Finley - there were 200 members of the London Philharmonic Choir, plus the Tiffin Boys' Choir of two dozen, a chamber orchestra of 12, the full orchestra and two conductors: Neville Creed and Kurt Masur.
Britten wrote the work for the consecration, in 1962, of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral. His decision to interweave poems by Wilfred Owen, a poet of the Great War, with the Latin Mass for the dead was a stroke of genius. It was also a masterstroke to write the Requiem for a Russian, Galina Vishnevskaya, a German, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and an Englishman, Peter Pears. The significance at the time was obvious. This LPO performance fielded North American-born soloists, greatly removed from the feeling of the time.
Gerald Finley seemed uneasy at first, uncertain how operatic to be, failing to catch the ambiguity of text and singing almost too beautifully. It was not until almost the end, with "I am the enemy you killed, my friend", that Finley really found his stride. Griffey was the more expressive soloist, his diction impeccable, his "One ever hangs where shelled roads part" within the "Agnus Dei" almost unbearably moving, sung as if a it was a lullaby. Brewer, too, was in magnificent voice, particularly in the "Lacrimosa", soaring over the huge forces although she was placed far behind the orchestra. She seemed positively to weep the notes in the "Benedictus".
But it was the massive chorus that underpinned the whole event. From their opening whispers of "requiem'" to the awkwardly jolly "Quam olim Abrahae", the urgency of their involvement was palpable.
Britten writes for huge forces but much of the score is delicately written. Masur drew both blazing and heartbreakingly intimate playing from the LPO, while Creed directed the excellent chamber ensemble accompanying the male soloists superbly. A deeply affecting performance of a profoundly disturbing work.