Fifty years ago Britten’s War Requiem received its premiere in the new Coventry Cathedral — the massive, modernist Basil Spence edifice that had just been built alongside the medieval cathedral bombed to a jagged shell in 1940. It was a fraught night. As Michael Foster recalls in The Idea Was Good, his new account of the War Requiem’s birth, Britten’s terse verdict was “orchestra second-rate, chorus deplorable, acoustic lunatic, and cathedral staff waging Trollopian clerical battles”.
Half a century on, the cathedral’s acoustic is no more helpful to music, and Trollopian clerical battles aren’t exactly extinct in the Church. But on the anniversary of that rocky first night the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus certainly made amends for their predecessors’ deficiencies with this atmospheric performance under Andris Nelsons.
The 1962 premiere took place at the altar end, under Graham Sutherland’s spectacular tapestry of Christ in Glory. This time the CBSO tried its luck the other way round, so we gazed out of the west window at the blitzed old cathedral while listening to Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. That was appropriate. So, too, was the ethereal effect of hearing the excellent CBSO Youth Chorus floating Latin chants from what seemed like heaven, up by the organ.
But the “lunatic acoustic” still caused a few problems. The pianissimo unaccompanied choral singing was sublime, but elsewhere the voices were too often obliterated beneath reverberations from timpani or wind instruments. So was the fine soprano, Erin Wall. Positioned up with the chorus (as Britten specified) she managed to ping across her top notes clearly enough, but not a lot else.
The two male soloists, tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Hanno Müller-Brachmann, fared better. I have rarely heard the fiendish ascent at the end of the Agnus Dei sung more sweetly or securely than Padmore managed here, and Müller-Brachmann’s superbly sustained timbre was the ideal foil in Strange Meeting. How apt that he was a pupil of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the peerless German baritone who sang in that 1962 premiere and, for many, epitomised the very notion of postwar reconciliation. Fischer-Dieskau died a fortnight ago, and the performance was dedicated to him.
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Sadly, the message of reconciliation embodied in this music and this building — both of them 50-year-old masterpieces — is as urgent as ever. Owen’s pessimistic words in Strange Meeting — “None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress” — seem as true now as in 1962 or 1918.