Benjamin Britten – War Requiem 1962
Following his critically acclaimed recordings of Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Paul McCreesh once again assembled the massive forces of the Gabrieli Consort & Players and the Wrocław Philharmonic Choir to record one of the masterpieces and icons of the 20th-century oratorio repertoire. This work reflects Britten’s long-held pacifist beliefs.
Benjamin Britten – War Requiem 1962
Following his critically acclaimed recordings of Berlioz’s Grande Messe des Morts and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Paul McCreesh once again assembled the massive forces of the Gabrieli Consort & Players and the Wrocław Philharmonic Choir to record one of the masterpieces and icons of the 20th-century oratorio repertoire. This work reflects Britten’s long-held pacifist beliefs.
Album premiere: 2013
Publishers: International Festival Wratislavia Cantans, Wrocław Philharmonic, Winged Lion
Conductor: Paul McCreesh
Performers: Susan Gritton, John Mark Ainsley, Christopher Maltman, Gabrieli Consort & Players, NFM Choir, Gabrieli Young Singers, Carducci Quartet
In 1958, Britten was asked to compose a huge work to celebrate the consecration of a new cathedral to be built by Basil Spence in Coventry. The composer’s imagination was fired by the striking contrast between the new building and the adjacent ruins of the original cathedral, almost completely destroyed by bombing during World War II. The fruit of Britten’s work was War Requiem, performed for the first time in the new cathedral on May 30, 1962. It marked not only a significant stylistic breakthrough in Britten’s development as a composer, but also a serious – deeply personal and at the same time openly public – artistic declaration of committed pacifism, in which composer had believed since his youth. During the extraordinary and emotional premiere of Requiem (during which one of the soloists burst into tears), it seemed that this work would be the composer’s last word on this subject. However, Britten returned to this subject in 1970 in the television opera Owen Wingrave.
In the 1950s, Britten was strongly impressed by the anti-war work of the great World War I poet Wilfred Owen and included one of his poems in his Nocturne. In the War Requiem, the Latin text Missa pro defunctis is interspersed with nine poems by Owen, which are mainly a bitterly ironic commentary on the ordinary text of the requiem liturgy.
Mervyn Cooke
- BBC Music Magazine Award 2014 – Choral Award
