Benjamin Britten's War Requiem

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem Benjamin Britten / Composer Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra UMS Choral Union Ann Arbor Youth Chorale Scott Hanoian / Conductor Tatiana Pavlovskaya / Soprano Anthony Dean Griffey / Tenor Stephen Powell / Baritone Scott VanOrnum / Organ Saturday Evening, February 16, 2019 at 8:00 Hill Auditorium Ann Arbor 32nd Performance of the 140th Annual Season Choral Music Series This evening’s performance is supported by the Jerry Blackstone UMS Choral Union Performance Fund and the Frances Mauney Lohr Choral Union Endowment Fund. Media partnership provided by WEMU 89.1 FM, WRCJ 90.9 FM, and WGTE 91.3 FM. The Steinway piano used in this evening’s performance is made possible by William and Mary Palmer. Special thanks to Stephen West and the U-M Department of Vocal Performance for their participation in events surrounding this evening’s performance. Mr. Griffey appears by arrangement with Colbert Artists. Mr. Powell appears by arrangement with Barrett Artists. In consideration of the artists and the audience, please refrain from the use of electronic devices during the performance. The photography, sound recording, or videotaping of this performance is prohibited. PROGRAM Benjamin Britten War Requiem, Op. 66 I. Requiem aeternam II. Dies irae III. Offertorium I V. Sanctus V. Agnus Dei VI. Libera me This evening’s performance runs approximately 80 minutes in duration and is performed without intermission. 3 WAR REQUIEM (1962) Benjamin Britten Born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, England Died December 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, England UMS premiere: This piece has never been performed on a UMS concert. Snapshots of History…In 1962: • First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy takes television viewers on a tour of the White House • The US announces its embargo against Cuba • The Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge is completed, connecting the twin cities of Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan and Ontario It is not a Requiem to console the living; commissioned by the Coventry sometimes it does not even help the dead Cathedral Festival, intended to be to sleep soundly. It can only disturb every performed in that stunning piece of living soul, for it denounces the barbarism modern architecture designed by more or less awake in mankind with all Basil Spence, and erected next to the the great authority that a great composer ruins of the old cathedral destroyed in can muster. There is no doubt at all, even World War II. This enterprise involved before next Wednesday’s performance, the participation of many prominent that it is Britten’s masterpiece. British artists. Britten had long wanted to compose These words, by the English critic a large-scale choral work, something William Mann, appeared in the London that all important British composers Times on May 25, 1962, five days had done before him. The commission before the War Requiem received gave him an opportunity to express its first performance in the newly his life-long pacifist beliefs. (Both he restored cathedral of the city of and his life partner Peter Pears had Coventry. After the premiere, critics been registered as conscientious and audiences alike were deeply objectors during the war.) He decided moved by this passionate plea against to compose a setting of the Latin war, expressed in a piece of music Mass of the Dead, interspersed with of surpassing beauty. In the 56 years some of the war poems of Wilfred that have elapsed since then, the Owen. Tragically killed in action at age Requiem has entered the international 25 just a week before the armistice repertoire as one of the greatest that ended World War I, Owen left a choral works from the second half of small body of poetry that denounced the 20th century. the war in extremely powerful terms. The exceptional impact of the War The poet achieved iconic status in Requiem has many reasons: musical, the decades after his death. His work historical, and philosophical. It was had demonstrably influenced Michael 4 Tippett when he wrote his own libretto work. Yet in Britten’s Requiem, the to the war oratorio A Child of Our Time, tenor solo immediately interrupts the another work in whose premiere Peter choral whispering as, accompanied Pears sang the tenor solo. by the agitated figurations of the harp In combining Latin liturgy with and a nervous motif in the strings, he vernacular anti-war poetry, Britten intones Owen’s poignant line “What had an important model in Ralph passing-bells for those who die as Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis cattle?” pacem. Yet Britten exploited the Here as throughout the work, the dramatic contrasts between the Latin text is sung by the chorus and two kinds of text more fully than the soprano solo, and Owen’s words his older colleague had done. He by the tenor and baritone. The liturgy didn’t always separate them neatly is often accompanied by the full in alternating movements but often orchestra and the Owen selections made them clash directly within the by a chamber ensemble. Some of same movement, carefully selecting the most moving moments in the the passages from the Owen poems piece, however, have no orchestral that created particularly strong participation at all: the first movement resonances with specific lines of the ends with a series of otherworldly liturgical text. chords sung by the unaccompanied Britten also had a personal stake in chorus in triple pianissimo, punctuated the composition, apparent from the only by two bell strokes. The same fact that he dedicated the work in music will return two more times, at memory of four friends, three of whom important junctures in the work. had been killed in the war, and the At the beginning of the “Dies irae,” fourth, also a war veteran, committed the horn calls of the Last Judgment, suicide in 1959. The four names listed in free rhythm, contrast with the on the first page of the score — Roger relentless march rhythm of the Burney, Piers Dunkerley, David Gill, chorus. The baritone solo answers and Michael Halliday —stand as four the choral “Tuba mirum” with a poem tombstones representing many more about the bugles of war. The Day of graves, marked and unmarked, of Judgment, one realizes, will not take victims of the war. place in some uncertain, mythical Britten was one of the great opera future. Rather, it has already arrived on composers of the 20th century and the battlefield. like his operas, the War Requiem is The soprano makes her first filled with an urgent sense of drama. entrance with “Liber scriptus,” In this, he followed Verdi, whose own to an angular melody in dotted Requiem is also frequently described rhythm, accompanied only by wind as operatic. There are even some instruments. The apocalyptic vision is direct resemblances between the linked to a modern one, in which the two works, for instance in the way soldiers recognize in Death an “old Britten, like his predecessor, has the chum” whom they do not fear, though chorus whisper the word “Requiem” the rhythmic and harmonic clusters in unison at the beginning of the of the music and the persistent 5 THE WAY WE REMEMBER WAR by Doyle Armbrust I’ve always been enamored with the one of the most cringe-worthy vivid detail with which people of my pieces not only by Ludwig van, but parents’ generation can recall the by any composer, ever (seek it out day JFK or MLK was assassinated: and prepare for a belly laugh). In any their exact location, the temperament case, the element that each of these of the weather, and the faces of three war-themed pieces share with those around them. My variation on the Britten is the reckoning with that theme involves the Challenger the horrors of war on a personal and disaster, Operation Desert Storm, and even spiritual level. This is not the September 11. The indelible memories 1812 Overture, with its make-believe of the second event on this list bravado. This is not about imagined include the front page of the Chicago valor — it’s about real people. Tribune (which I saved until college), The War Requiem consumed Britten watching battleships blast 16-inch during the years of its writing, and shells into the night on live television, looking back, it’s hard to imagine that and collecting Desert Storm baseball a more perfect structure could have cards. My first sentient — if safely been chosen for such a monumental removed — exposure to war involved piece or the solemn occasion of its deciding whether or not to trade a premiere. In 1962, the consecration SCUD missile for a Dick Cheney. of the new Coventry Cathedral, There is often a disconnect which was erected next to its bomb- between the grandeur of war and ravaged predecessor, was a study the personal fallout from it…say, the in the stirring juxtaposition of “then distance between the charming and now.” Britten, one of the most stories my great uncle would tell me erudite and deep-thinking composers about being a barber on a Navy ship of any era, parallels this reality by in the Pacific in the 1940s, and the combining the historic Requiem inaccessible look in his eyes while he mass (full orchestra and chorus) with spun the yarn. The bridging of these contemporary poetry from the point of two realities is what makes Benjamin view of real soldiers by Wilfred Owen Britten’s War Requiem an indisputable (chamber orchestra with tenor and masterpiece. baritone soloists). But he doesn’t stop What are the first three classical there. With the inclusion of a children’s music scores about war that pop into choir and organ, the implausible your head? For me — setting aside optimism that there is in fact hope for the Requiem for a moment — it’s peace in the future merges its way into Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims this landmark work.

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