Britten's War Requiem at Coventry: Where the Walls Still Tremble

Sixty-two years on, the work that undid Fischer-Dieskau at its premiere retains every ounce of its physical threat. Gerhaher and Staples delivered ferociously under Yamada's still, graceful baton.

The War Requiem was written to be sung in this building, for this occasion — the 1962 consecration of Coventry Cathedral, bombed to its bones twenty years earlier by the Luftwaffe. That origin isn't incidental backstory; it is the entire architecture of the piece. Britten structured it so the Latin mass and Wilfred Owen's war poems exist in separate acoustic worlds that only occasionally, devastatingly, collide. Performing it anywhere else is a compromise. Performing it here, with some of the original boy choristers in the audience and Armistice Day on the calendar, is as close to ideal conditions as the work will ever get. Kazuki Yamada conducted with what the Guardian's reviewer calls 'bewitching stillness' — which is exactly the right instinct. The War Requiem does not need conducting so much as it needs holding. Push it and it becomes bombast; release it and it becomes cosmos. Yamada held it. The CBSO Chorus came through with blended tone the reviewer describes as the smoothest they've heard — an important detail, because Britten writes the choral writing as a kind of civic mass, impersonal and enormous, against which the solo voices must feel shockingly individual. Christian Gerhaher delivered his baritone lines stripped of vibrato — 'as direct as any of Owen's words,' in the reviewer's phrase — which is the correct interpretive choice and not a universally obvious one. Many baritones warm up Owen's bitterness, make it elegiac. Gerhaher apparently refused. Andrew Staples found the melodic beauty in Britten's tenor writing, which is the complementary task: the two soloists must feel like different kinds of grief, not the same grief at different volumes. Soprano Olga Peretyatko was placed within the chorus rather than in front of it, her line becoming what the review calls 'shining filigree' — an unusual staging choice that pays dividends, letting her represent the liturgy's transcendence rather than commanding it. The War Requiem is not subtle about what it costs to make it. It requires a full symphony orchestra, a chamber orchestra, a large chorus, a boys' choir placed spatially apart from the audience, and three soloists — one ideally from each of the warring nations (at the premiere: an English tenor, a Russian soprano, a German baritone). That scale is itself the argument. Britten is saying: peace requires this much collective effort, this much coordination across old enmities. When it works — when hundreds of voices raise together in what the reviewer describes as the work's radical shifts from intimacy to monumental sweep — it is one of the few moments in the concert hall that functions as genuine political speech. The review is careful to say the work has 'lost none of its currency,' and Owen's texts 'still shock.' That's worth sitting with. Owen wrote 'Dulce et Decorum Est' in 1917. Britten set it in 1961. We are now sixty-three years past that premiere and the texts have not aged into historical curiosity. That is either an indictment of the century or a testament to Britten's formal choices — probably both. The work is available on BBC Sounds until 10 December.