Post by john ashbyPost by nickThe Telegraph liked it and made a direct to the choir. Ask if you would
like an archived link but it will have to wait until I am using
something I can properly cut and paste with.
Nick
Please and thank you.
john
Ooh-err.
Trying to paste
<https://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/classical-music/best-classical-jazz-concerts-august-2024/>
into archive.today or archive.ph is getting redirected to a
Russian site. I don't know whether it's the Canada factor or
whether somebody has got it in for the Internet Archive more
generally but I'm putting this message here as a kind of
placeholder to remind me to have another go from the UK if
nobody has managed to trap it before.
In the meantime here's a text version of the review:
BBC Proms/ Britten’s War Requiem ★★★★☆
It was heartening as well as surprising to see an absolutely
packed Royal Albert Hall for Saturday’s performance of
Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. Completed in 1962, it is a
difficult and disturbing piece, and hardly a traditional
Proms crowd-pleaser. Those rapt and utterly silent 6,000
showed that, as the poet Philip Larkin famously put it,
“someone will forever be surprising / A hunger in himself to
be more serious”. Some might say it’s the anguished, turbulent
state of the world that drew them there. But that’s always
been the state of the world, at least since the work was first
performed in Coventry’s new cathedral in 1962, alongside the
bombed-out ruins of the old.
Sorrow at the never-ending suffering wrought by war is the
only stable, uncomplicated emotion conveyed by this piece.
Everything else is shifting and ambiguous. The consolation one
expects in a requiem seems sometimes about to blossom, but
it’s constantly undercut by the bitter sarcasm and furious
denunciations of the nine poems by First World War poet
Wilfrid Owen, which are interpolated within the Latin mass.
The heavenly trumpets of the Sanctus are offset by the “sad
bugles” of the battlefield, the “innocence” of the boys’
choir is soured by the troubled, dissonant organ. The
constantly recurring bells seem gaunt, a portal to emptiness
rather than the Last Judgement.
Clarity is the key to bringing all these many layers to life,
and that’s a quality hard to achieve in the huge space of the
Albert Hall. Last night’s performers managed it, magnificently.
The diction of the combined London Symphony Chorus and BBC
Symphony Chorus was pitilessly sharp, as were the menacing
rhythms from the London Symphony Orchestra brass in the Dies
Irae. Way up in the gallery, the excellent Tiffin Boys Choir
and an unseen organist sent an ironic “heavenly” radiance down
upon us. Only the beginning seemed a little too tentative to
register in that enormous space.
As with the famous Requiem by Verdi that inspired Britten, it’s
the soloists who bring the warm human perspective to the angry
or terrified visions of the chorus. Soprano Natalya Romaniw,
standing at the back with the chorus, was tenderly moving in
the Lacrimosa (Full of Tears) and fiercely stark in the Rex
Tremendae (King of Awful Majesty). Baritone Will Liverman
brought a lovely soft-grained nostalgic quality to “Bugles sang,
saddening the evening air.” The soloist who really caught the
heart was tenor Allan Clayton. He could have been more jocular
in the poem about soldiers sharing a jolly meal with Death, but
he conveyed beautifully the twilight sadness of the first poem,
alongside LSO bassoonist Nina Ashton. And he caught better than
any performance I’ve ever heard the utter oddness of the final
“Strange Meeting”, in which the spirit of a dead soldier
encounters the enemy he killed.
Controlling all this to-and-fro between the hectic realm of the
battlefield and the timeless world of the mass was Antonio
Pappano, who next month becomes the LSO’s Chief Conductor. As
you’d expect from a man with decades of experience in the opera
house he made the dramatic transitions in the piece seem
particularly eloquent, especially the final one between the
tremendous outcry of the Libera Me Domine, where at last the
mighty Albert Hall organ was heard, and the almost inaudible
beginning of the final poem.
After that came the final “In Paradise”, where Pappano wisely
reined in Britten’s too-sweet major-key consolation, brutally
cutting it off with a gaunt bell-stroke. The chorus’s troubled
groping for one last, comfortless major chord made disillusion
seem both moving and true. IH
Broadcast on BBC Four tonight (August 18) at 8.00pm. Listen on
BBC Sounds and watch on BBC iPlayer for 12 months. The BBC
Proms continues until September 14. bbc.co.uk/proms