“War Requiem” A Moving Experience

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30195, 29 July 1963, Page 14

“War Requiem” A Moving Experience

To hear Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem,” performed in the Wellington Town Hall on Saturday night, was a moving experience. The work was commissioned to celebrate the consecration last year of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, and it was a thrilling experience to have the opportunity of hearing it so soon after its original performance.

The forces required for performance are considerable: a large choir, a boys’ choir, a large orchestra, a chamber orchestra, soprano, tenor and baritone soio voices.

An initial difficulty in presenting this work is finding a place to give it in. Britten has compounded his requiem on two planes, the liturgy of the Roman office with the images of truth of Wilfred Owen’s poems. How much he wants his forces on various planes has to be considered. The solution the Wellington Town Hall offers may not reach the ideal, but it is a workable one Britten evokes sounds to cover an immense spatial area, so that sounds behind sounds, the near and the far —symbolysing the immediacy of pain and the timelessness of the liturgy—become an integral part of his work. This idea of music and space, of music being more than what goes on at the end of the concert hall, has been the concern of composers particularly in the last decade. Music lovers in Christchurch should clamour for a performance of this requiem. But considering the physical difficulties, where should that be? Is it out of the question to consider the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament? Placing Of Forces In the town hall, the boys’ voices could be placed distantly, that is to a listener in the body of the circle; the full orchestra and chamber orchestra shared the same platform and there seemed little aural reason why the chamber orchestra was especially designated. Its effect was

simply that of a reduced orchestra.

John Hopkins handled his forces firmly: the work got away to a splendid start, and he was given an ovation at the end

The soloists, Angela Shaw and Graeme Gorton were good; Peter Baillie was outstanding: he had really studied the part, knew what the poems were about and sang intelligently. One has also never heard him sing more beautifully. The Christchurch Royal Musical Society’s choir had obviously been thoroughly and finely coached by Mr R. Field-Dodgson. We have no choir in Wellington as good as this, and realise immediately we hear its tone what tradition, what work lies behind it. The men particularly were right on the mark. The soft, melting cadences of the whole choir were lovely, marred only at the close by the devil himself being abroad with what sounded like a whistling kettle. Splendid Section The clamour of voices to the words “Pleni Sunt Coeli" was splendid and altogether there was a fine ring in this section. In the few forte passages given to the choir one would have liked more “bite,” and later, one wondered whether this choir would not do well to master another twentieth century masterpiece, Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms" But this may well have been that Mr Hopkins did not ask more of them. Quality was there in the choir, and it can seldom have given such subtle and varied sounds.

The boys’ choir from St. Patrick’s College, coached by Father Mills, brought to their part that tone of heart-break-ing innocence that Britten all his life has known. It was a singular experience to hear thia requiem. The triumph was Britten’s. This work was written at the height of his creative powers. One is left not with a memory of vivid orchestral effects, of moving choral ideas, but of gentleness, and of Owen’s soldier, the jacket stained with blood, beyond pity, forgiven. —F.P.