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November 17 2006

Westminster Cathedral
Britten War Requiem


 Susan Bullock
James Gilchrist
Simon Keenlyside
Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by David Hill
Bach Choir

Choristers of Westminster Cathedral

 

 

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)

·        Lacrimosa 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)

 

 

 

 

What the critics say

Click on the photo for a review by Jane Garratt

 

Neil Fisher, The Times, November 22, 2006

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14936-2463586,00.html

Three stars

It was the silence at the end that spoke the most. Not just the dutiful pause between music and applause, but a tomb-like communal hush that seemed to catch even the orchestra and conductor unawares.

This is what you gain when Britten’s War Requiem soars through a giant space such as Westminster Cathedral. It ensures that the choristers — here the Cathedral’s own — sound suitably unearthly as they beg for eternal rest for the victims of war. And the Cathedral is the perfect packaging for a chorus as nuanced and responsive as the Bach Choir, able to switch from luminously vivid prayer to anguished fervour in an instant.

The trouble is that Britten’s ambiguous Mass is a protean effort with diverse (and often conflicting) requirements. For this performance the Bach Choir’s musical director, David Hill, was on the podium with the Philharmonia, which inevitably meant that orchestral detail suffered at the expense of the chorus’s dexterity.

Equally, the very telling contrast between the grand orchestral flourishes that accompany the chorus and the grainier colours of the chamber ensemble accompanying tenor and baritone soloists was muted by the Cathedral’s acoustic. When the Requiem does drag — and it does, occasionally — the slightly clotted textures that resulted were not ideal.

And what are we to make of the Wilfred Owen settings, both part of this consolatory Mass but also a subversive commentary on it? Here there was a sharp divide between James Gilchrist and Simon Keenlyside’s contributions. Gilchrist’s tenor was mellow, soothing, only intermittently adding the sting to Owen’s satirical blasts. Keenlyside, however, was the doomed youth incarnate, somehow squaring the circle of nobility and bitterness, resignation and resentfulness.

Eventually, the Requiem gently elides into its astonishing finale; here no-one could fault the tenderness with which Gilchrist and Keenlyside confronted Owen’s Strange Meeting, nor the laserbeam focus of Susan Bullock’s soprano, at its very best as she joined the closing farewell. Then came that silence, and any criticism was redundant.

 

 Hugh Canning for The Sunday Times, 26 November 2006 (extract)

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2101-2465708.html

“…The Bach Choir and Philharmonia Orchestra joined forces at Westminster Cathedral for a moving, sometimes shattering performance of Britten’s War Requiem, the most enduring and beloved of his large-scale non-operatic works.

Britten initially wanted his choral masterpiece performed only in holy places, but after a performance in Westminster Abbey, he thought better of it. The echoey acoustic of the cathedral may not be ideal, but it is an appropriately dramatic setting, with the painted crucifix that looms over the choir achieving a symbolic synergy with the music when the tenor, the excellent James Gilchrist, sang the words of Wilfred Owen’s At a Calvary Near the Ancre — “One ever hangs where shelled roads part” — in Britten’s Agnus Dei. This was just the most poignant moment of a thrillingly sung performance, with the glorious baritone of Simon Keenlyside joining Gilchrist as “the enemy you killed” in Strange Meeting, and Susan Bullock intoning the hieratic solos of the Latin text with dramatic soprano bravura. David Hill, the Bach Choir’s music director, conducted with masterly control. An uplifting concert.”