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Benjamin Britten: War Requiem

1 August 2004

Royal Albert Hall, London

(Prom 22)

 

Photo: C. Christodoulou / Lebrecht

 

Ian Bostridge (tenor)

Simon Keenlyside (baritone)

Susan B. Anthony (soprano)

Timothy Bond (organ)

Finchley Children’s Music Group

London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus

under Colin Davis

Benjamin Britten:

Voluntary on Tallis’s Lamentations (organ) – World Premiere

War Requiem

I. Requiem aeternam

·        Requiem aeternam   (choir)

·        What passing bells for these who die as cattle? (tenor)

II. Dies irae

·        Dies irae (choir)

·        Bugles sang, saddening the evening air (baritone)

·        Liber scriptus proferetur (soprano)

·        Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death (tenor/baritone)

·        Recordare Jesu pie (choir)

·        Be slowly lifted up (baritone)

·        Dies irae (choir)

·        Lacirmosa dies illa (soprano/choir)

·        Move him into the sun (tenor)

III. Offertorium

·        Domine Jesu Christe (choir)

·        So Abram rose, and clave the wood (tenor/baritone)

IV. Sanctus

·        Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus (soprano/choir)

·        After the blast of lightning from the East (baritone)

V. Agnus Dei

·        One ever hangs where shelled roads part (tenor)

VI. Libera me

·        Libera me, Domine (choir)

·        It seemed that out of battle I escaped (tenor/baritone)

·        Let us sleep now – In paradisum (baritone/tenor/soprano/choir)

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What the critics say

 

Crossing the great divide: At the Proms, peace and Britten are entwined to powerful effect. Extracts from Anthony Holden’s review for The Observer, Sunday August 8, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/reviews/observer/story/0,,1278523,00.html

 

…..Much the same could be said of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, magisterially performed at the Proms by the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Colin Davis.”

 

“The two male soloists represent a First World War English soldier (tenor) and his dead German counterpart (baritone), as in Owen's 'I am the enemy you killed'. Originally written for Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the parts were taken with the gravest commitment by Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside.”

 

 

 

 

War Requiem. Erica Jeal for The Guardian, Tuesday August 3, 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/proms2004/story/0,,1274871,00.html

.5 star rating

 

”The soprano, Susan B Anthony, was more secure in the forceful Rex Tremendae than in the twisting Lacrimosa, but the other two soloists, Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside, could hardly have been bettered. They both put across Owen's poetry with a solemn, fierce beauty. By the final "Let us sleep now", they had pushed themselves to their emotional and vocal limits. Colin Davis conducted with a cool head, ensuring that the work achieved its full impact.”

 

 

 

 

A strange meeting indeed. By Anna Picard for The Independent, 8 August 2004

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article50935.ece

“ With due allowances for the acoustic handicap of the Royal Albert Hall and soprano soloist Susan B Anthony's wayward intonation, this was a magnificent War Requiem: beautifully delivered by the London Symphony Chorus and Finchley Children's Music Group, faultlessly played by both the tutti and chamber sections of the orchestra, and quite fascinatingly delineated by Davis.

Summing up the special qualities of a particular conductor is a dangerously subjective business. But what I find most striking about Davis in Britten is his apparent impartiality. He does not tell you what to feel, does not apologise for excess or deficit, does not attempt to "make good" the fractures which others might try to smooth over. And, like his January performance of Peter Grimes, this War Requiem had signal clarity, warts and all. If the end result was a unique First World War cantata grafted onto an off-the-peg mass, so be it. The individual elements - some of them equal to Britten's finest operatic writing, some of them terribly routine - shone to the best of their abilities, and the finest of these were superb: Simon Keenlyside's rich, solemn reading of Owen's lyrics, Ian Bostridge's fluting, fluttering anxiety, and the duets between them that seemed to me to encapsulate the characters of soldier poet (Keenlyside) and pacifist composer (Bostridge). Strange meeting, indeed. An admirable and deeply memorable performance of a faulty work.

 

 

Prom 22: Britten's War Requiem, Royal Albert Hall, London

By Edward Seckerson for The Independent, 4 August 2004

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article50060.ece

Rating 4 stars

 

“Ian Bostridge and Simon Keenlyside were a quite exceptional pairing for a work forever haunted by the voices for whom it was written - Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Individually, and together, Bostridge and Keenlyside made us forget the very particular intonation of their predecessors. They kept the delivery simple but engaged, coloured just enough to make key words and phrases tell. The contemptuous consonants of Bostridge in "What passing-bells"; the mellowed despondency of Keenlyside in "Bugles sang"; the shrill, demented marching song that has our comrades in arms laughing death in the face; and death itself in "Strange Meeting", the poem through which Britten so movingly brings the hope of reconciliation.

 

I don't think I have ever heard Bostridge sing more beautifully than he did in the poem that Britten unforgettably juxtaposes with the "Lacrimosa" - "Move him into the sun". The ache of it was heartbreaking. The soprano soloist Susan B Anthony, however, was disappointing in this same number. The pitching was neither as limpid nor as sure as it needs to be, sounding preoccupied with the technical at the expense of the inspirational.