At 2 p.m. Eastern today, the Berlin Philharmonic will begin a live broadcast of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem led by Sir Simon Rattle, in honour of the composer’s centenary. Judging from dress rehearsal video posted on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall site, it should be a fantastic performance.
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The soloists are wonderful: soprano Emily Magee, tenor John Mark Ainsley and baritone Matthias Goerne.
The Berlin Philharmonic normally charges admission to its Digital Concert Hall, but in a deal with Gramophone magazine, is offering free viewing to people who register and enter the code WARREQ79C. This code will be good for post-live-performance streaming, as well, the magazine promises.
The War Requiem is one of the 20th century’s masterpieces, and is deeply moving.
Gramophone earlier this week published reminiscences by John Culshaw, who helped make the original Decca recording. He is still thankful that the original performance at the re-dedication of Coventry cathedral 51 years ago wasn’t recorded: “the BBC transcription provides pretty strong evidence against those few critics who still insist on the sanctity of live performances transferred to disc. No amount of talk about ‘atmosphere’ will alter the fact that a great deal went sadly awry in Coventry that night. That the War Requiem survived such a series of understandable – and, in the case of a single performance, unimportant-mishaps is a tribute to its resilience. ”
Culshaw reserves his most powerful tribute to the piece to the end, in a message that speaks directly to what separates any great piece of music from something that is merely good:
Of the work itself I can only say that, having lived with it very closely for about four months, and having heard it upwards of 50 times, its profound impact has not lessened for a moment; on the contrary, like all great music, it yields different values on each hearing. It is a very disturbing piece. The contrasts and indeed contradictions between the three planes of its structure give the War Requiem an extraordinary tension; and their conjunction in the final section of the work is anything but a facile reconciliation. Over these final pages stand, unheard and unset, the words of Wilfred Owen with which Benjamin Britten prefaced the score: ‘All a poet can do today is warn.’
You can read the full article here and go directly to the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall here.
John Terauds
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