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.
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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.