LPO opens season with searing account of Britten's War Requiem

Britten's War Requiem, one of the most pointed anti-war statements in the choral repertoire, opened the London Philharmonic Orchestra's new season at the Royal Festival Hall, framed under the banner "In Search of Purpose". Conducted by Edward Gardner, the performance leaned into the work's unresolved tension between mourning and rage.

Britten composed the piece for the 1962 consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, interleaving the Latin Requiem Mass with poems by Wilfred Owen, the First World War poet killed a week before the Armistice. Owen's 1918 preface to his war poetry - "All a poet can do today is warn" - supplies the work's guiding sentiment, and this performance emphasised that warning over easy consolation.

True to Britten's original conception, the three solo roles were cast to represent nations that had once been at war with one another. Ukrainian-Welsh soprano Natalya Romaniw sang the Latin Mass movements, while American tenor Paul Appleby, stepping in for an indisposed Allan Clayton, and German baritone Benjamin Appl carried Owen's settings, their exchanges built around the idea of reconciliation between former enemies.

The choral forces were drawn from across London's musical institutions: the London Philharmonic Choir and the London Symphony Chorus supplied the adult voices, with the Tiffin Boys' and Girls' Choirs contributing the distant, otherworldly treble lines Britten places apart from the main ensemble. Their hushed, pianissimo singing in the closing pages offered a much-needed glimpse of hope amid the score's bitterness and snarling irony.

The performance underscored how the War Requiem continues to resist being heard as a period piece. Britten wrote it as both a memorial to the dead of two world wars and a caution against "greater wars" still to come, a warning this account did not allow the audience to set aside as history.