The first performance of Britten's War Requiem, in 1962, was a major public event, hyped like no premiere in British music before or since. The piece was proclaimed a masterpiece before it had ever been heard. It had to be, given the circumstances of its commission: it was created to celebrate the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, which was built alongside the ruins of the old cathedral destroyed by bombing during the second world war.
Though not by instinct a public composer, Britten consciously designed the piece as an act of national reconciliation, writing the solo parts for singers from Britain, Germany and Russia, and interleaving Wilfred Owen's poems with sections of the requiem mass as a condemnation of the futility and brutality of any war. Certainly he caught the public mood, and the acclaim of the premiere was redoubled a couple of years later when the War Requiem appeared on disc.
Forty years on, there is no doubting the iconic place it still occupies in the country's musical consciousness. Coventry Cathedral was packed on Tuesday when the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, who premiered the work in 1962, marked the War Requiem's 40th anniversary (strictly speaking, three months late) with a performance conducted by Sakari Oramo.
In one respect the event was more authentic than the original: Britten's plan to have a multinational trio of soloists had been thwarted by the Soviet government, which refused to allow the soprano Galina Vishnievskaya to perform. This time there was a Russian soprano, Elena Prokina, who was joined by John Mark Ainsley and Dietrich Henschel, together with the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and the City of Birmingham Youth Choir.
Yet the occasion did not pull at the emotions as expected, and one left the cathedral wondering just how much the audience in 1962 had really heard of Britten's score. The acoustic in the building is unforgivingly dreadful, and although this performance tried to improve the sound by reversing the seating plan of the premiere and moving the orchestra and chorus to the other end of the building, we were left with only a general sense of what was going on.
The Owen settings were the main casualty: Ainsley and Henschel simply could not get their words across. Prokina's thrilling, hieratic sound fared much better. Oramo, meanwhile, controlled everything with a sure sense of drama, and the great climaxes had palpable power. However, the fine detail of Britten's scoring and all the verbal nuances were lost in the aural mush.
