Prom 37, War Requiem, Clayton, Liverman, Romaniw, LSO, Pappano review - terror and tenderness

This year’s Proms programme initially gave rise to some now-customary sneers about predictability, banality and dumbing down. Well, it all depends on where you sit, and what you hear. And my seats have witnessed one absolute humdinger after another.

Last night, Sir Antonio Pappano and his London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus partnered with three exceptional soloists to deliver Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem with a commitment, intensity and, above all, ferocious attention to detail that made it an occasion to remember, and to celebrate. 

To call this performance “operatic”, given Pappano’s CV, might sound like a thoughtless cliché. On the contrary: rather than aiming for grandiose and overblown gestures (though the scary climaxes did raise the roof), he dug into Britten’s nuanced human drama at every turn, with ever-shifting emotional contrasts of light and shade, horror and tenderness, majesty and privacy. He commanded an extraordinary dynamic range, and made the quietest passages tell even amid the unforgiving canyons of the Royal Albert Hall. 

And he sustained a fine balance between the two male soloists who sing Wilfred Owen’s desolating poems of “the pity of war” and the massed choirs (pictured above), with solo soprano, who carry the traditional Latin words of the requiem mass. I thought not just of Verdi’s and Mozart’s shades, which Britten so audaciously summons, embraces and then transforms, but the composer of Billy Budd and Peter Grimes – the creator of fragile beings tangled in the ropes of fate but trying to feel, and sing, their way out of Hell. 

To Pappano’s right sat the dozen-strong chamber ensemble who accompany the tenor and bass: Allan Clayton and Will Liverman, who faced the conductor. Behind the main body of the LSO, beside the percussion for whom Britten writes with such diabolical ingenuity, stood the soprano, Natalya Romaniw (pictured below). At the back rose the steep choral ravines peopled by the LSO chorus and BBC Symphony Chorus, with the Tiffin Boys’ Choir – offstage bringers of celestial respite from the battlefield terrors – high up in the galleries. 

Pappano’s assured generalship made each unit count, and blend. He gave everyone their chance to shine, and made the textures of this epic work clear, bright and distinct, with no sense of fuzzy solemnity. He dialled down volume as often as he pushed it up, and made rare patches of rest and peace hit almost harder than front-line fortissimos. He also advanced briskly: just under 80 minutes from “Requiem aeternum” to “Requiescant in pace”. Commissioned to mark the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Britten’s great act of mourning for the victims of all war is alive at every moment to the sense-quickening carnival of destruction. The spectacle of slaughter sickens, but it likewise thrills. Pappano invested the work throughout with nerve-jangling excitement. 

I worried at the outset that the hall’s vast expanses would enhance the choral showpieces but diminish the Owen song-cycle set for tenor and bass. Clayton (pictured below) made short work of that anxiety, his “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?” announcing a big-boned, broad-shouldered tenor, different for sure from Peter Pears’s original styling, but perfectly suited to this space. In his “Bugles sang”, and a couple of later numbers, Liverman’s baritone had a refined and reflective quality that, however noble, risked being drowned. But when it cut through, above in the mesmeric finale of “Strange Meeting”, his tender intimacy made the great barn shrink to the size of a recital room. 

Up among the drums, Romaniw projected powerfully, and never over-compensated for her remoteness from the other soloists with undue stridency. Again, her operatic (in the best sense) skills lent colour and character to the mass text, from the urgent menace of “Rex tremendae” to the gorgeously blues-like swoon of the “Lacrimosa”. Here, we heard not just the Britten who had made himself into an operatic genius but the idiomatic cabaret composer of the 1930s. Meanwhile, Pappano steered the choirs through passages of bristling tension and explosive violence, entries knife-sharp and diction spittingly, brutally clear.  If “Dies irae” snarled and boomed as it should, a beautifully lilting “Recordare” lullaby bathed us in honeyed solace. 

Offstage, the Tiffin boys (pictured below) sounded firm as well as sweet as they offered angelic respite in “Domine Jesu Christe" and, later, in the “Hostias". This followed Owen’s bitter twist on the story of Abraham and Isaac as Clayton and Liverman, finely blended here, finished the parable not with the boy’s rescue but the patriarch’s willingness to slay “half the seed of Europe, one by one”. At such key junctures we need to hear the Britten the angry, righteous, satirical pacifist, as well as the builder of august musical monuments. Pappano’s flair for quicksilver theatricality made these moments sting, as the chamber ensemble, bassoon and harp outstanding, punctuated the vocal lines. 

From first to last, the LSO matched the rolling, surging drama of Pappano’s direction with playing rich in individual and sectional flavour. The percussion rattled, spat and blasted not just with crushing force but, when required, with an even more terrifying quiet precision. The brass snorted, growled and on occasions shrieked before veering into mellow warmth with equal authority. 

Led by Benjamin Gilmore, the chamber group added their richly expressive voices to tenor and bass – from Chris Richards’s clarinet to Daniel Jemison's basson, Gareth Davies's flute and Suzy Willison-Kawalec’s harp – as Pappano made sure that their band-within-a-band spoke up and stood out. Indeed, his overall direction made the parts count as much as the whole, although the grandest passages – the choirs’ “Hosanna in excelsis”, or the shattering return of the “Dies irae” in the “Libera me” – lacked for nothing in bone-shaking firepower. 

All three soloists had moments that clutched the heart: whether Clayton‘s gentle, hard-won harmonic resolution in “Dona nobis pacem” (the only time he sings the Latin, rather than Owen’s anguished verse), Romaniw’s serenely commanding “Benedictus” or, at the close, Liverman’s rapt invocation (pictured below) of “the pity of war distilled” in “Strange Meeting”. 

As the singers’ “Let us sleep now” gave way to an exquisitely controlled “In paradisum” from the children’s choir, Pappano built up intersecting layers of sound and meaning with an unerring hand while the tolling bell, with which we had begun, returned. He was rewarded by a proper spell of silence at the end, before the thunderous acclaim that he – and all his troops – had earned. 

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