Britten - War Requiem

Peter Pears (Artist), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Artist), Galina Vishnevskaya (Artist), Benjamin Britten (Composer, Conductor), London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (Orchestra), Melos Ensemble of London (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Melos Ensemble of London
• Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus
• Conductor: Benjamin Britten
• Composer: Benjamin Britten
• Audio CD (October 25, 1990)
• Number of Discs: 2
• Label: Decca / London
• ASIN: B0000041Q5
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #90,743 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)
  • #1 in Music > Classical > Opera & Vocal > Divas > Vishnevskaya, Galina
  • #15 in Music > Classical > Opera & Vocal > Voices > Tenors
  • #27 in Music > Classical > Opera & Vocal > Featured Performers, A-Z > U to Z

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 60 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best it will ever be, June 4, 2000

By 

Mark Swinton - See all my reviews

This review is from: Britten - War Requiem (Audio CD)

Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" is one of the most well-known choral works to emerge from Britain in this last century, although it is not a true Requiem in that it combines the Latin Mass for the Dead with excerpts from the celebrated poetry of the tragic First World War victim Wilfred Owen. The texts go hand in hand throughout the piece, and through his music Britten touches a nerve like no other composer - he captures in great profundity the horrors of war, both subtle and gross.

There are many fine recordings of the work available, but this one is simply beyond comparison. The finest musicians of the day are guided fastidiously through the challenging score by Britten himself. What results is a powerful rendition, chilling and moving in all the right ways. I must single out one moment in particular: the "Agnus Dei," which sets a sorrowful ground bass-like figure underneath a melting tenor solo (using as text the poem "One ever hangs"). The orchestra and choir are magically soft throughout this track, but more magical still is the incomparable singing of Peter Pears. It is one of those rare moments in which tears and heart-warming joy can freely mingle, and only a stony heart would not feel such emotions upon listening to it.

This release is made all the more remarkable for the inclusion of a "making-of" section, in the form of several tracks taped during the rehearsal sessions. This is a wonderful and rare opportunity to hear Britten's voice: he gives out explicit instructions, and comes across as insistent and stern (but still capable of making the odd joke!). Apparently, when Britten found out about it he was not best pleased and I doubt that he would approve of the release of this material if he were alive today. Nonetheless, whilst he was often making recordings of other music, he rarely recorded his own, and ultimately it was a fine decision of the producer to capture this piece of work in progress. There is a saying that composers are not always the best interpreters of their own music; from this recording, it's clear that such an adage did not apply to Benjamin Britten. Despite all this, I believe that whether or not you want to listen to it is up to you - in a way, some of the thrill and magic is taken out of the main recording if you listen to it as it was in preparation.

In any case, whether you seek an introduction to this landmark composition or are looking for a good rendition on CD, this version is the only one to go for, in my honest opinion. And thanks to Decca's best available technology, the sound quality is astonishingly pristine.

This is most definitely essential listening...

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Britten's War Requiem and Silence, January 21, 2000

By 

James D. Eret (San Diego) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Britten - War Requiem (Audio CD)

As a poet and Veteran of the conflict in Vietnam,I was interested in the war poems of Wilfred Owen, a poet of WWI who was killed just a few days before the end of that war. Owen's poems moved me to tears and utter silence. Then I listened to War Requiem by Britten and Owen's poetry soared to new heights. The orginal recording on CD seems the best of many good versions. It is pretty hard to go wrong with this material. The raging passions of war are evoked, the brutality and madness, the noise, the smoke, the horror, and the searching for a way to make meaning out of chaos, a way to make friends of all enemies. That Britten was a conscientious objector during WWII comes as no surprise. There is only so much that can be expressed by words or music about what war does to the body, to the soul, and Britten comes so close to that expression, with music that augments the Owen poetry of despair and of hope, that somehow through a process we hardly have a name for, we will fight no more. Anyone feeling that war is glamorous and noble should listen to Britten's War Requiem;maybe they won't change their minds about conflict with their fellow human beings, but just maybe they might have second thoughts, that every life is precious, that we, as a global community, have more in common than differences. After each listening of this CD, I am stunned to silence. There is Britten's and Owen's Visions, and I am left with hope that we may live in peace.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Original and still the best, August 16, 2005

By 

Klingsor Tristan (Suffolk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Britten - War Requiem (Audio CD)

This was the piece of music that first really turned me on to classical music, listening to the very first performance from Coventry Cathedral on a small tranny radio. What I failed to realise then was that this massive impact was achieved by brilliant structural simplicity.

The whole work is effectively a study on the tritone, the 'diabolus in musica', that most disturbing and unstable of intervals. From the bells at the start to the harmonically ambiguous endings of the first and second movements and of the entire work; from the alternating tonics of the boys' Te Decet Hymnus to the alternating tintinnabulations of the soprano's Sanctus; from the fanfares of the Dies Irae to the two halves of the tenor's ineffable Dona Nobis Pacem at the end of the Agnus Dei. All these and countless other examples revolve around or grow out of the tritone. And what better musical image for war could there be than those two most irreconcilable notes in the scale?

Then, of course, there is the inspired concept of juxtaposing the hieratic incantations of the Latin Mass for the Dead with the burning anger of Wilfred Owen's First World War poems. There are, in fact, three tiers of performers in the War Requiem - the boys' choir and chamber organ, objective and dissociated in the distance; the soprano, chorus and orchestra singing the Latin Mass at, as it were, the centre of things; and the tenor and baritone with the chamber orchestra delivering Owen's bitter poems in the intimate and confidential foreground. The different perspectives of these three groups are a vital aspect of any performance and are ideally realised by producer, John Culshaw (of Golden Ring fame) and his team on this premiere recording.

After that first performance and subsequent ones in London, this recording was awaited with great anticipation. But even the most optimistic marketing man at Decca wasn't prepared for the overnight success of the enterprise. Classical music albums - especially of new music - weren't supposed to sell like that. From the iconic (and, at the time, unique) simplicity of the cover to the superlative standard of the recorded sound, never mind the quality of the performance itself, it outstripped the highest expectations.

And what of this performance? These were the performers for whom the piece was written - from the three soloists (specifically, a Russian, an Englishman and a German) to the inimitable Jimmy Blades in the chamber orchestra's percussion department. Famously, the Soviet Minster of Culture prevented Vishnevskaya from performing at the premiere and Heather Harper had to stand in and learn her part in just 10 days. By the time she recorded the part, her voice was not what it was in 1962. The purity of tone and the anguished commitment of her singing at moments like the Lacrymosa that one remembers from those first performances are very different from the more distanced interpretation with a touch of Slavic wobble that we get from Vishnevskaya. Different, but not necessarily better or worse. Pears and Fischer-Dieskau are, dare I say, peerless. Glorious singing from both: human, bitter, angry, touching, heartbreaking (Move Him into the Sun), heart-restoring as they duet the two dead enemies of Strange Meeting to sleep. The touch of a German accent in Fischer-Dieskau's otherwise immaculate English puts a new perspective on many of the poems that fall to his part (not just Strange Meeting) - but, after all, the Germans must have shared all the same feelings that Owen expressed so poignantly in his poetry.

As for Britten's control over all these forces (the first time, I think, that he hadn't shared the conducting, usually with Meredith Davies), it is as masterly as you would expect from the creator of it all - and one who was an illuminating conductor, too, both in his own and in others' music.

There have been many other recordings since this one. Some may have matched it in some departments some of the time. None can touch it for its inspired expression of a masterpiece, fresh from the making.