The War Requiem - written to celebrate the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral in 1962 - was as close as Benjamin Britten came to an unqualified commercial success: 200,000 copies of the original recording were sold within five months of release.

Britten's innovation was to combine the choral maelstrom of the Latin mass with settings of Wilfred Owen's first world war poems, delicately scored for tenor and bass. The reconciliatory message was emphasised by the choice of British, German and Russian soloists; though there's a sense that, following his controversial decision to spend the war years in the US, the work was also Britten's peace offering to the British public.

For this performance, the Northern Sinfonia was super-sized, with the addition of the Orchestra of Opera North, Huddersfield Choral Society and Trinity Boys Choir. But the occasion elicited only a moderate turnout and a tepid response.

It now seems significant that Britten made no further public statements on this scale, but withdrew into the more intimate soundworld of the cello sonatas, church parables and chamber operas. However impressively the Huddersfield singers did justice to Owen's evocation of "shrill, demented choirs", conductor Takuo Yuasa could not quite avoid the suggestion that within the vast, swollen trumpery of the Requiem, there is a more modestly dimensioned work trying to be heard.

Tenor and baritone soloists Paul Nilon and Grant Doyle enunciated Owen's words with a limpid clarity that made Janice Watson's shrill interpolations seem strangely superfluous. Owen wrote that in time of war, "all a poet can do is warn". Britten's Requiem conveys a dispiriting sense of a warning left unheeded.