Britten's War Requiem, first heard in 1962 in Coventry Cathedral, then newly rebuilt after its destruction in the second World War, interpolates war poems of Wilfred Owen between the sections of the Mass. The composer conceived the three solo vocal parts for a Russian soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya), an English tenor (Peter Pears) and a German baritone (Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau), representing three nations which suffered in the war (but curiously omitting the Jews, who suffered most).
The piece was instantly and widely acclaimed - it was hailed as Britten's masterpiece - and sold 200,000 copies in five months when released on LP with the composer conducting.
Takuo Yuasa's reading at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast on Friday delineated clearly the mastery of large forces that Britten brought to bear on what was clearly a deeply-felt undertaking - boys' voices and organ almost out of sight in the upper recesses above the choir and soprano soloist, the two orchestras on stage below, the two male singers ranged with the chamber orchestra on the right.
Yuasa got some touchingly restrained singing from the RSNO Chorus. However, there seemed little he could do about the waywardness of the soprano, Janice Cairns, or the unevenness of the two men, the sensitive tenor Richard Edgar-Wilson sounding rather too light, the baritone Christopher Purves, stronger of projection, not always cleanly on the note. Reservations apart, the men's interweaving in some of the composer's pathos-rich duets was one of the performance's high points.
But the immediacy of effect which so impressed early audiences now feels almost too easy. Or, rather, so it seemed in a performance which remained so firmly in the regions of efficiency, without conjuring anything of the specially-charged atmosphere that the piece so clearly calls for.
