Royal Festival Hall, London
Benjamin Britten's War Requiem is 50 years old this year. Inevitably, some of the generational immediacy of the work has declined. But Britten's heartfelt pacifist statement is still as potent, and with the settings of Wilfred Owen again entrusted here to a leading English and German soloist, just as at the premiere, there was even something of the world of 1962 in this performance, too.
Lorin Maazel's stately conducting seemed, at times, to glide over the surface of the Requiem, more concerned to illuminate its musical rockface than unlock its deeper passions. But Maazel's professional virtues – his absolute sense of structure and spatial arrangement, his penetrating ear for colour, and his ability to keep the work's immense and complex forces in balance – were all meticulously displayed. The Philharmonia orchestra and its augmented chorus were excellent, with Nancy Gustafson singing the solo soprano passages, as were the Tiffin Boys' Choir, singing from the Festival Hall's royal box.
What lifted the performance to a special level, however, was the singing of Mark Padmore and Matthias Goerne in the Owen settings, which weave their way through the traditional structure of the Latin mass. Padmore was outstanding, the clarity and authority of his singing revealed in every contribution, nowhere more so than in the way he caressed the word "gently" at the start of the setting of Owen's Futility; or in the tender weight he brought to the most exposed tenor moment in the whole piece, the supercharged rising phrase of Dona Nobis Pacem at the close of the Agnus Dei. Goerne's more obviously physical singing, his English indistinct, provided a deeply expressive and more restless counterweight, and he more than matched his English colleague's profundity at the end of Strange Meeting, when the two protagonists are reconciled in death and the Requiem emerges into those troublingly haunted, hanging final chords that can stay with the listener for days afterwards.