The hushed stillness that followed this performance of Britten’s War Requiem told its own story. For once, not even the Proms’ ‘bravo’ boys drew premature attention to themselves; moreover, when general applause was finally unleashed, I felt like joining them. Sir Antonio Pappano may only be the LSO’s Chief Conductor ‘designate’ but make no mistake: the two are already an item, as this moving BBC Prom affirmed. May their union be a long and happy one.
Another kind of silence followed next morning: that of the reviewer who wants so much to go the whole five stars but who cannot overlook a flaw in this musical diamond. The American baritone Will Liverman was a mellifluous soloist but from where I was sitting (in a good seat) he sounded overwhelmed by the scale of the Royal Albert Hall. Either that or he was singing for the BBC microphones rather than the Hall’s vast acreage; either way, for much of the evening he was barely decipherable despite being accompanied by the small chamber orchestra rather than the full symphonic forces. This was especially problematic in After the blast of lightning from the East, as war poet Wilfred Owen’s profound threnody failed to carry across the auditorium.
At the opposite extreme, the combined BBC Symphony and London Symphony Choruses gave an intense, impassioned account of a score that makes constant demands of them. Yet it was no surprise that these choristers delivered every phrase of their Latin text as expressive drama, nor that their sound was so unified and precise, for Pappano is an opera man who knows how to bring the best out of a choir. The opening Requiem aeternam was hushed yet sung in full voice rather than a whisper; the “Amen” that closes the Dies irae simply rapt. The women’s voices were seraphic in the Recordare; the massed men sounded as a single animated entity in Confutatis maledictis. Add the Tiffin Boys’ Choir, their treble and alto voices ringing bell-like from high in the distant gallery in the very timbre that Britten expected of a boys choir, and the sound picture was one of cinematic spectacle. What Steven Spielberg did for the Normandy landings, Britten and Pappano did for World War 1.
Soprano Natalya Romaniw is renowned for Slavic and Russian repertoire, particularly as Tatyana in Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, but here her contributions had an altogether richer, more authentic tang, as close as dammit to that of Galina Vishnevskaya who had been Britten’s hand-picked soprano for the part. Allan Clayton, who knows the tenor line inside out, sang his crucial music with desperate exquisiteness, especially the floated beauty of his rare moment of Latin, “Dona nobis pacem”.
The LSO has a mighty history with Britten’s magnum opus. Not only did the orchestra play on the legendary Decca recording under the composer, it has re-recorded it twice since (with Hickox and Noseda) and given countless live performances. The personnel may change but this music is in its DNA. Pappano’s operatic propulsion kept the machine of war pulsing through a quickfire Liber scriptus; heartless brass interventions chilled the blood both in the raging Dies irae and at the shattering climax of the Libera me, “When the heavens and the earth are moved”; yet most unsettling of all were Pappano’s near-impossible pianissimi on Britten’s hushed string tuttis. It was an aural panoply of horror and pity.
