Cumbria Choral Initiative: Britten War Requiem

Kendal Parish Church

COVENTRY was bombed on November 14, 1940, leaving the 14th Century Cathedral a burnt-out carcass. The foundation stone for a new cathedral, alongside side the ruins, was laid in March 1956. In 1958 Benjamin Britten was commissioned to write a major work for its re-consecration planned for May 1962. Britten, born the year before the Great War, was approaching 50 and was a highly acclaimed writer of opera and songs. This commission gave plentiful scope for all his skills and he created a unique format: the War Requiem. All great works need an overall structure to give strength to the whole, allowing for individualist detail within it. Britten chose the Mass for the Dead to give a sense of (almost) timeless ritual. For the detail within this frame he chose war poems by Wilfred Owen MC, who served on the western front and was killed aged 25, exactly one week before the Armistice in 1918.

November 2014 marked the Commemoration of the start of the first World War. Kendal Parish Church was full to capacity a good half-hour early. It took twenty minutes for the performers to take their places: the Chorus of 140 voices along the north wall, with the 70 players of the CCI Orchestra (leader Roland Fudge) to their left. At the west end of the aisle, by the organ console, were the young voices of Amabile Girls Choir. These forces perform the liturgical movements of the Requiem. To the east was the 12-piece chamber orchestra. After brief safety and welcome notices from the Vicar, The Revd Robert Saner-Haigh, the soloists entered, all three familiar faces from previous visits to Kendal. The soprano Elizabeth Traill, who sings with and above the main Chorus, and tenor Nicholas Hurndall Smith with baritone John Lofthouse who sing the roles of the English and German Soldiers initially sung by Peter Pears and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. With the soloists was conductor Ian Jones, who took responsibility for guiding all the performers through their separate and interlinked parts, spread over a very wide sound stage. Kendal Parish Church has two essential qualities for this – five aisles with thin pillars, and a very dry acoustic so that you can hear a pin drop throughout the whole space.

The audience was drawn into the performance from the very start, as we all stood while a lone bugler sounded the Last Post. Bugle calls are one of the key building bricks of Owen’s poems and Britten’s setting. A second element is a simple scale up and down through an octave: like a child practising, though intervals in the scale are subtlety altered. The third element is taking rhythms and adding an extra beat: this dominates the march of the second movement, made threatening by being in 7/4. The final Britten element is the addition of a children’s choir: the poignancy of the innocent providing something like angelic consolation as sung by the upper voices, and the slightly more earthy teenage anxiety of the lower part.

This would have been a terrifying work if had been just the Mass for the Dead though, as a Mass, it could provide the consolation of familiar Ritual, which is one the Church’s prime responsibilities. The War Poems blast all that away. Their subject is War: the Pity of War. Their effect is made even more searing when the two ‘Soldiers’ are standing there, a few feet in front of you surrounded by choirs of recognisable friends and neighbours. Poet and Composer take no prisoners. After years of writing songs for Peter Pears, Britten is in his element. Syllables and notation intertwine: bugles sang; demented choirs of wailing shells; spilling mess-tins; voices of boys; spat bullets, coughed shrapnel; fatuous sunbeams; blast of lightning; no guns thumped. Britten even resurrects his own Canticle II of 1952 – the story of Abraham and Isaac – adding a very sinister twist at the end.

For much of the work Britten keeps his forces separate: the Recordare plea for mercy is set for four-part ladies chorus followed by four-part men’s chorus. The Pleni sunt coeli of the Sanctus divides the chorus into eight parts, freely chanting from ppp to fff. In the chamber orchestra, harp and flute mingle magically in ‘lightning from the east’; the timpani have a dramatic duet with the baritone as the great gun is slowly lifted up; the piccolo has its moment as the Soldiers sing ‘We whistled as [Death] shaved us with his scythe’, while the side drum is kept constantly busy accompanying the stutt’ring rifle’s rapid rattle. Finally, all came together in the long Libera Me, sung by the Chorus, Orchestra, and Soprano in a carefully notated and perfectly executed accelerando leading to a top Bb, and an almighty crash of full Orchestra. That could have been the end: but the Chorus subsides, still crying Libera me, to Nothing. The chamber orchestra plays an apparently endless chord, creating an utterly surreal soundscape of total desolation. Two Soldiers, who once had laughed together at Death, emerge through the gloom. One declared to a totally silent church: ‘I am the enemy you killed my friend’. Together they repeat the incantation ‘Let us sleep now’, as the Soprano and eight-part Chorus sing ‘In paradisum’.The children’s choir chants over the top of the huge ensemble: ‘May the choir of angels receive thee and may thou have eternal rest’. The last line, sung a capella by a six part Chorus, is allowed to sink to the eternal rest of the pastoral key of F major. It left all of us in stunned silence.

A friend from the Chorus asked me if I had enjoyed the performance. This account has been my answer. Britten’s War Requiem is an event which all should experience – about once every ten years! All thanks and praise to Ian Jones and the Cumbria Choral Initiative for their dedication, hard work, and courage in offering us such complete Catharsis.

John Shippen