Can one be a 'traditionalist' about performances of Britten's War Requiem? There are, in my head, two performances: one, obviously, the Britten-conducted Decca recording; the other a stunning and outstanding performance at the Proms conducted by Kurt Masur*, which, like last night's, also ended with a long silence before the audience could bring itself to applaud.
There was a serious difference between then and now. The last baritone solo was sung then from the gallery, a distant, haunting, melancholic, gentle, emotional piece that brought unbidden tears to many eyes. Followed by several seconds of silence from the audience as they absorbed the implications of the whole before they applauded. Masur, I remember, with a diffidence no-one expected, held up the score to the audience: it was not, he was saying, their performance that had created that reaction, but the work. though it could hardly have happened without them, of course.
Last night, Andris Nelsons beat Gergiev's record for holding off the audience's applause. But it was contrived. His intention, obviously, was to impose a one-minute silence upon the whole of the Albert Hall; the audience respected it; but whether for the whole sixty seconds I can't be sure. I'm not entirely sure that it should have been done.
What exactly were we supposed to be observing a minute's silence for? To remind us of November 11th? To reflect upon the dead of the first world war? to reflect on the horrors of war? If any of that comes out of the music, then that is something that should, can, only be spontaneous. At least no-one offered any of the soloists a bouquet of poppies.
This was an unusual performance of the War Requiem. And, with its other contrivances. It began with unusually retrained tempi; and some of the great climaxes, like the blaring brass of 'Rex tremendae' relatively constricted. The real great thundering orchestral climax was left to the Albert Hall organ; rather like a giant trampling over what had gone before.
Nelsons treated this primarily as a choral requiem mass for the dead, deploying enormous choral forces. But that is to give both the bitter pathos of involvement in war that are in the words of the poems and the scoring that represents such a harsh contrast between the mass in memory of the dead, which celebrates in a sense the inevitability of a death in the past and the words of the dead and dying which present to all our consciences the fear of the inevitability of death in wars in the future.
That, it seems to me, is the essence of Brittten's War Requiem, and why he gave it that title. It is not, as Nelsons seemed to think, a requiem like one of Verdi or Barlioz. It is also musically intensely dramatic: it is not hard to hear, even subconsciously, the rattle of machine guns, the boom of artillery, in the percussion: and the contradictory moments of peace, quiet and that sometimes did (and do) intersperse the greater noises and violence of armed conflicts.
There is great drama there. Not only in the physicality of the noise, but the psychology of the poetry and the poets the soloists represent. The War Requiem, in some ways, is as operatically fierce and baits the emotions just as much as Billy Budd or Peter Grimes.
That, though, in the over-emphasis on the choral requiem, was missing last night. There is great pathos in the poetry—and therefore a necessity on the part of the audience to be able to reflect on it as it is sung—which it overwhelmed. It was—not wanting to be tarred with some kind of rebarbative traditionalist brush where only the composer's vision is the only one—certainly a different interpretation; I'll accept that. But, despite the glorious singing (the children's choir up in the gallerywas particularly remarkable) as I began to reflect afterwards, and do again now, it was too contrived to stand up in the end as anything other than a curious experiment.
*Rather oddly, this seems to have been more or less forgotten as far as the internet is concerned (perhaps partly because of the way the Beeb has managed to pretty well monopolise Google with this season) but it was, according to last night's programme, in the 1990 season with the RPO. (We had thought it was '89, the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War.) We both thought after that—and to me, the events of this year again reinforce the feeling—perhaps the War Requiem ought to be as regular a part of the Proms season as Beethoven's ninth.
iPlayer
If you want to read a review which starts from an entirely opposite position, I recommend Classical Iconoclast's. I can't say I disagree about, for want of a better term, the 'musicality' of the performance. In fact, it did absorb me in that respect very effectively at the RAH. I cannot deny it was cleverly musically involving. But reflection still tells me that however enterprising it was I still cannot really feel it respected the intentions or the real purpose, or the raw emotions of Britten's score.
(I shall be at the 'volcano' Prom tonight; and others over the Bank Holiday. Whether I shal be abler to post anything will be entorely dependent on Notting Hill Carnival. I live in the middle of it, and the noise level tends to make it near impossible to concentrate on anything else . . .That said, I'm looking forward to being woken on Sunday and Monday mornings by traditional Blues as I am every year. . .)
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