Any recording of the
War Requiem
is inevitably going to be compared with the composer’s own version made
in the Kingsway Hall, London, shortly after the first performance in
Coventry Cathedral. It is amazing to realise, from John Culshaw’s
autobiography
Putting the record straight, that Decca had so
little confidence in the work that they originally intended to issue a
live recording of the disaster-ridden Coventry performance. Even after
LPs were ready for issue they completely failed to anticipate the
demand for them and were unable to satisfy the orders of customers for
some months. Rather touchingly Culshaw recalls the lament of one Decca
executive: “Could you think you could talk him into writing another
Requiem that would sell as well? We wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.”
The
presentation of this new recording echoes the Decca LP boxes in one
immediate respect - the cover. Decca employed the bare title of the
work printed on a black background, echoing the cover of the printed
score; here we have the bare title on a white background, and it is
equally effective. The excellence of the presentation does not stop
there; we have a solidly bound hardcover book with complete texts,
translations, and multiple essays on the 1962 première of the work and
the performance under discussion in both English and Polish (the
language of the choir). The texts come with photographs of the trenches
during the First World War, which have clearly been carefully selected
to illustrate the particular facet of Wilfred Owen’s poems which are on
the adjacent pages. Even more commendably the photographs in the Polish
section of the book, which are all different, are chosen with similar
relevance. Incidentally there is a discrepancy in the descriptions of
the first performance; Maggie Cotton tells us that the programme for
that performance specified “no applause … by the request of the
composer”, but Tony Palmer on the other hand states that the lack of
applause disconcerted the performers, who took the silence as a sign of
disapproval and “were [not] quite sure what to do.” They can’t both be
right.
Where this performance differs from Britten’s own
is in the manner of the recording. Britten recorded the whole work in
Kingsway Hall, and Culshaw describes in some detail the manner in which
different acoustics were obtained for the full orchestra, chamber
orchestra and boys’ chorus by placing the forces in different parts of
the building. Here we are given three distinct recording venues,
presumably one for each of the sets of forces involved - although this
rather important matter is not discussed in the notes. The fact that
two different organists are credited - one for the full orchestral
passages, and another for the sections with the boys’ choir - confirms
one’s suspicions, however. Britten himself clearly wanted a difference
in the sound of the various sections - it led to disputes with his
soprano soloist Galina Vishnevskaya - which he sought to realise with
Culshaw’s assistance. Thus, the fact that this recording has been
electronically stitched together from three distinct acoustics is not a
real problem. Indeed, there seems to be little real acoustic difference
between the various venues, although the greater distancing of the
sound does not have the immediacy or impact that Culshaw captured in
the now demolished Kingsway Hall. For example, the timpani lack the
ideal violence of definition in passages such as “Be slowly lifted up,
thou long black arm”. Also the boys’ choir are so distant as to be
almost inaudible at their first entry in the
Hostias which
counterpoints the ironic “half the seed of Europe, one by one”. This
hardly sounds more in the audio picture during the final
In paradisum.
It
should be noted that the recording has a very wide dynamic range, much
wider than that of the Britten discs. If you set the volume to a
reasonable level for the quietest passages such as “I am the enemy you
killed, my friend” you are likely to be blasted out of your seat by the
Dies irae.
McCreesh is an old hand at dealing with spatially separated forces
in his recordings of ceremonial music - and the
War Requiem
should surely be placed in that category. Britten’s work is
by far the most recent score he has recorded with his Gabrieli forces.
Indeed, although the orchestra is credited as the ‘Gabrieli
Players’, the forces involved, with a Wagnerian complement of
strings, an additional chamber orchestra, and not least the use of
modern instruments, mean that the instrumental body here is far more
than simply the same group of players writ large. One could indeed
gather this from the presence in the named forces of individual instrumentalists
well-known from other orchestral bodies.
For Britten’s own recording he made symbolic use
of three singers from different combatant nations in the World Wars:
Britain, Germany and Russia. At the first performance difficulties were
made by the Soviet authorities about the participation of Galina
Vishnevskaya. Her role was taken over by the Irish soprano Heather
Harper - who only managed to subsequently record her role commercially
with Richard Hickox some twenty-five years later. Many performances and
recordings since have attempted to mirror Britten’s intentions, using
soloists from different nationalities as circumstances permitted. Here,
apart from the use of a Polish chorus, singing throughout in Latin, all
the soloists are British. This makes sense in terms of the settings of
the Wilfred Owen poems - there are points in the Britten recording
where it is not easy to make out the words of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau,
even with his superlative diction - but one rather misses the sense of
reconciliation between the soloists of the warring nations that one
found with the ‘original cast’. On the other hand Susan Gritton is a
far steadier soprano soloist than was Vishnevskaya with her wild
Slavonic vibrato. Gritton sounds more reminiscent of Harper. Both John
Mark Ainsley and Christopher Maltman relish the irony and passion of
Owen’s words, with diction which matches that of Pears and
Fisher-Dieskau. That said, Maltman cannot equal the German singer’s
sense of desperation in the line “May God curse thee, and cut thee from
our soul!”
The
War Requiem is an awkward work to fit
onto CD, just too long for a single disc - and several of the
recordings, such as the much-praised version by Hickox for Chandos,
have supplied other pieces to fill up the playing time on the second
CD. Britten’s own recording originally came on CD without coupling, but
for the reissue Decca included extracts from the rehearsal sequences
which Culshaw had recorded surreptitiously without Britten’s knowledge
(and to the composer’s apparent displeasure) which make for a
fascinating bonus. Culshaw had recorded much more of these sequences,
but it appears that the tapes were subsequently and lamentably
destroyed. However here McCreesh gives us no additional material at
all, splitting the two CDs in the same way as the original LP issue of
Britten’s recording. There are however only tracks for the individual
movements of the score, so that it is for example impossible to select
any specific passage in the lengthy
Dies irae.
Considering
the expense and difficulty of assembling the massive forces required,
there are a surprisingly large number of recordings - thirty currently
listed in Archiv - of the
War Requiem in the catalogues. Given
that any recording is always going to be something of a special
occasion, it is not so surprising that most are extremely good, many of
them having something special of their own to contribute.
This fiftieth anniversary recording comes pretty
well at the top of the modern list, but no recording is ever going to
totally supersede the original which had composer, soloists, chorus,
orchestra and recording engineers all performing at the very top of
their game. Britten never did write “another
Requiem that would sell as well”, but the
War Requiem
will do very nicely, thank you. It is a work of blazing genius which
alone would bid defiance to those critics who want to take pot shots at
the composer because of his sexuality, paedophiliac tendencies,
cowardice, or whatever in the way of mud they can find to throw at
Britten in his centenary year. I understand that the Britten recording
has been re-mastered in its newest release, and also comes complete
with a Blu-Ray disc of the tapes which presumably brings it back into
the highest reckoning in terms of recorded sound.
I should however mention one other recorded
performance which, if memory serves, also rivals the original Britten
recording. That was a television broadcast of an Albert Hall
performance in 1993 with Britten’s friend and colleague Mtislav
Rostropovich conducting the main body of chorus and orchestra, Richard
Hickox as an independent conductor (as the composer designed) of the
chamber forces, and Anthony Rolfe Johnson and Bryn Terfel as the male
soloists. I don’t think this performance has ever been commercially
available on DVD or CD - there are pirated versions around - but it
should be.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
See also review by
John QuinnBritten discography & review index:
War Requiem
