Shostakovich declared Britten's War Requiem and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde the two greatest large-scale works of the 20th century. I don't dispute it, and always thought that each should only be heard once every three to five years, keeping their impact fresh. This, though, is my second War Requiem of 2026, and it couldn't have been more different from the first on Good Friday at the Baden-Baden Festival. The sensational Joana Mallwitz then mastered the massive size of the Festspielhaus; here Edward Gardner took advantage of the Royal Festival Hall's dryish immediacy to pull no punches. Both interpretations reinforced Shostakovich's verdict.
How can one not marvel throughout at Britten's seemingly intuitive connections between a Requiem that he makes at first about unrest - the tritone so skilfully used to undermine eternal peace - and his phenomenal chamber settings of Wilfred Owen war poems for tenor, baritone and 12 instruments, honed through work on the smaller-scale operas? How is it that he can take sounds from Shostakovich and Stravinsky and make them his own?
We thought we had lost a fulcrum in Alan Clayton's withdrawal, but his substitute, Paul Appleby (pictured above by Andy Paradise), inflected and attacked Owen's painful words with perfect judgement and full voice (very different from Peter Pears, the original interpreter; Ukrainian Bogdan Volkov's compelling performance in Baden-Baden showed study of that seminal recording).
Let's get the weak link over with before praising other glories. Objectively, Benjamin Appl's sound is monotonous, dry, with less lower register than tenor Appleby's. He did a good job with the words, and given support from the handful of instruments in the darkness of "Strange Meeting", managed to make "I am the enemy you killed, my friend" moving. But personally I find his success baffling.
Everything else moved forward as one under Gardner (pictured above by Andy Paradise). The London Philharmonic Choir (chorus director Madeleine Venner) and the London Symphony Chorus (chorus director Mariana Rosas) were clear in diction throughout, with Gardner making sure they shaped the journey towards shattering climaxes in the "Dies Irae" and "Libera Me" with colours unusual for large groups. The children who offer another dimension to the Latin text, the Tiffin Boys' and Girls' Choirs behind us, had more energy and swiftness than usual, very refreshing, and Natalya Romaniw was sensitive as ever in her alternations between the oracular and the blended.
The two stretches of overwhelming emotion were as they should be: Appleby turning the express screw on "Move him, move him into the sun" between dying falls of the "Lacrimosa", and the whole of the final sequence. With brass so clear throughout, their fanfares echoed on woodwind in some of the Owen settings, and strings trudging vividly, the pacing of the "Libera me" to the unleashing of the Festival Hall organ was duly shattering. And then, of course, the setting of Owen's most eloquent lines in near silence - a true parallel to sounds against nearly nothing in Mahler's "Das Abschied" - followed by the not-overdone build of "Let us sleep now" and "in Paradisum".
In his annotations for the original booklet accompanying the Decca LPs, record producer John Culshaw writes of "Strange Meeting": "neither it nor its setting requires comment". I just did, a bit, but the end of the performance was followed, as usual, by a very long silence. A lady in front of me stumbled on the way out and said "I'm not drunk", and I agreed that our legs were unsteady beneath us, as always after the most profound performances (pictured above by Andy Paradise, the full scope). You can now catch a performance in Dublin under Anja Bihlmaier, and an Armistice Day rendering in Coventry Cathedral, which the work re-inaugurated in 1962, from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under its excellent principal conductor Kazuki Yamada. I might just make that a third War Requiem this year.
