Picture by Yevhen Gulenko
This weekend at The Cleveland Orchestra, performances of Benjamin Britten’s Conflict Requiem started and led to silence. Earlier than giving the downbeat, Klaus Mäkelä bowed his head, clasped his arms collectively, and appeared to supply a non-public prayer. After the music concluded, he held a hush for what felt like endlessly, because the musicians and soloists onstage wore expressions starting from awe to terror and shell shock. The gestures appeared like acceptable bookends for the intense, principled work that took on even higher significance amid the newest spherical of world armed battle.
What got here between was raucous, chilling, and infrequently arrestingly stunning. Britten made no small calls for for the orchestration of this 1962 work, commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Chapel, which had been badly battered throughout World Conflict II. A efficiency requires a full complement on stage, plus a 12-player chamber orchestra, a blended grownup choir, an off-stage boys choir, and three vocal soloists. The sheer person-power could account for the work’s relative rarity, not less than on this nation. I’d solely heard it dwell as soon as earlier than, a decade in the past in Philadelphia.
Cleveland had the forces to spare, although, and whereas the top end result wasn’t at all times excellent, it totally captured the profound nature of the work. Begin with The Cleveland Orchestra Refrain, which might be the perfect volunteer choir within the nation. Britten calls on them to convey thunder and lightning at occasions, however the work rises and falls on the quieter, harmonically advanced passages that dominate.
Choral director Lisa Wong produced an ensemble that was assured, safe, and beautifully intoned from Requiem aeternam to the ultimate Amen. The refrain typically entered with the clear precision of an organ. Jennifer Rozsa well positioned the boys of The Cleveland Orchestra Kids’s Refrain within the balcony, permitting their angelic sound to encompass the viewers; they appeared nearly like emissaries from Heaven amid the horrors of conflict depicted within the textual content and music.
Picture by Yevhen Gulenko
A lot of the vocal drama falls to the soprano, who dietary supplements the choruses within the Latin texts. Tamara Wilson introduced a perfect temperament to the project, fiery within the assertive Liber Scriptus and gunmetal-cool within the descending scales of Lacrimosa. Positioned between the orchestra and grownup refrain in the course of the Severance Corridor stage, she by no means struggled for quantity, crusing effortlessly among the many massive, thorny forces. Her tone remained clear and delightful in even essentially the most troublesome moments.
Britten juxtaposed the everyday Latin textual content for the Mass of the Useless with poems by the English author Wilfred Owen, a tragic determine who died in World Conflict I, precisely one week earlier than the Armistice. Tenor Andrew Staples and baritone Ludwig Mittelhammer voiced these interludes commandingly, placing the views of the misplaced troopers onstage. Staples’s ethereal, extremely positioned tenor prompt the tragedy of 1 already misplaced, notably within the Britten setting of “Futility” on the finish of the Dies Irae part. Mittelhammer typically reminded this listener of his position’s creator, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, although with a sense for legato that the older artist ceaselessly lacked. Their duet on “Unusual Assembly,” culminating within the hauntingly repeated phrase “Allow us to sleep now,” was shattering.
Mäkelä took over conducting duties from an indisposed Daniel Harding simply two weeks in the past, having by no means led this work earlier than. Merely protecting all of the balls within the air would have been admirable, however the busy younger maestro delivered an interpretation that felt concurrently seamless and deeply weighty. There was some overly wobbly brass enjoying within the first two actions, plus the occasional cue that got here a second too quickly. However in complete, Mäkelä drew enjoying each achieved and ravishing, and completely in step with the tone of the piece. The woodwinds that ceaselessly accompanied the Owen settings had an particularly unsettling chunk. The percussion sounded militaristic with out turning kitschy. On the conclusion, the chamber orchestra got here along with the complete forces to supply a sound each tragic and exultant. The shocked silence Mäkelä demanded was earned.
Nice artwork exalts humanity and stands as the last word distinction to the mindless destruction of conflict. Britten, a dedicated pacifist, felt this in his bones. After the premiere of Conflict Requiem, the critic William Mann wrote that “it might probably solely disturb each dwelling soul, for it denounces the barbarism kind of awake in mankind.” Amid an everlasting sense of conflict that also permeates, this efficiency held up a damning mirror whereas additionally giving a glimpse of our higher selves. Almost 65 years on, its energy stays undiminished.
