Ch r is Lee
{ Program Notes
The BSO
draws the scale down to the personal: the
emotions of soldiers on the eve of battle as
they await their own “Day of Judgment.”
Heavy dissonances in the strings and horn
graphically portray their dread — almost
the sound of stomachs turning over.
The soprano soloist makes her entrance
with the Requiem’s “Liber Scriptus” text;
her wide-arching phrases sound oracular
and superhuman as though she were
the very voice of the Book of Judgment.
The twisting lines of the chorus suggest
humanity writhing in terror before the
judgment. Contrasting with this terror is
the bravado of Owen’s “The Next War,”
a tenor-baritone duet. Introduced by the
snare drum, the soldiers boast of their
friendly intimacy with death; virtuoso
effects from woodwinds and two violins
imitate the whine of bullets and scream of
shells overhead.
After this very macho duet comes the
contrast of the women’s voices singing
the Requiem’s “Recordare, Jesu pie”—a
prayer for Jesus’s mercy—in silken fourpart harmony. Their grace is chopped off
by the rhythmic violence of the choral
basses’ “Confutatis maledictus,”
26 O v ertur e |
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punctuated by ferocious snaps from the
low brass, like demonic jaws devouring
the souls of the damned. The tenors’
swelling theme pleading for mercy (“Oro
supplex”) combines with the bass theme
to create a distorted sonic nightmare, leading directly into the pounding timpani of
the next Owen poem.
Introduced by the snare
drum, the soldiers boast
of their friendly intimacy
with death; virtuoso effects
from woodwinds and
two violins imitate the
whine of bullets and scream
of shells overhead.
Britten set only six lines of Owen’s
“Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of Our
Artillery Brought into Action” for
the baritone soloist, but with them he
paints an overpowering musical portrait of the monstrous gun using the
singer’s ponderously elongated notes
and the hard-stick accompaniment of
the timpani. After the baritone crests
to a triple-forte high note, we are again
inundated by the “Dies Irae” music.
Its fury spent, the “Dies Irae” collapses into the tender, melancholy
“Lacrymosa” for soprano and chorus.
Here an Owen poem is virtually merged
with the liturgical text: the tenor’s setting of “Futility.” As the soprano sings
of “the days of tears and mourning,” the
tenor-soldier mourns his recently dead
comrade in one of the War Requiem’s
finest examples of Britten’s exquisitely
sensitive text setting.
The “Offertorium” opens with
the distant, otherworldly voices of the
children’s choir, surrounded by a halo of
piled-up tritones and other dissonances on
the organ. This is followed by one of the
work’s most spectacular moments: Britten’s brilliant, full-dress choral fugue on
the words “Quam olim Abrahae” (“As
you promised to Abraham and his seed”),
with its finger-snapping hemiola rhythms
and trilling “look at me” flourishes from
the orchestra.