Britten’s War Requiem: stories from the choir
In this section we will include any stories or points of interest from CEFC members or their families and friends. If you have any to offer please email them to Maggie Huntingford.
Lynn Eaton
After university, at Warwick, I moved to Birmingham for my first job. It was a new city for me and I didn’t know a soul. A woman at the place where I worked sang in a choir and encouraged me to come for an audition.
I got in… and only then realised what I’d achieved. The choir was the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and it was at one of its most exciting times: the early 1980s, just after Simon Rattle had been appointed conductor.
I’d sung in choirs for most of my life, at school and for a short while at university too, so I was used to choral singing. But to be singing War Requiem – one of the most difficult pieces I had ever encountered – was terrifying. It was certainly not something my Grade V piano lessons had prepared me for. I struggled to get my head around the strange intervals and the syncopated rhythms. I remember other chorus members taking pity on me for having joined for such a difficult musical piece. They too were finding it hard going. But the piece had a special meaning for them as the CBSC was the choir that had first performed it, back in the 1960s, at Coventry Cathedral (where, as it happens, I had my graduation ceremony).
After the obligatory rehearsals and the concert, we then went on to record it for EMI, in Birmingham University’s main hall, over several evenings in the week immediately afterwards. The soloists were Robert Tear, Thomas Allen and Elisabeth Soderstrom. It was an amazing experience and left me totally hooked on the piece, and on the power of the conductor to shape a bunch of tired but nonetheless highly motivated singers into a beautiful sound. It was hard work, but the little exchanges (Robert Tear singing some unrepeatable lines about Britten’s passion for little boys, instead of the correct words for the Dies Irae, for instance) remain with me.
So too do the friends I made through that experience. Cathy, the woman who encouraged me to come along for that audition, has become one of my best friends, even though we’ve both moved to new cities, made new friends, and joined new choirs. I also still regularly see Christina, the woman who I sat next to the night of that first rehearsal.
Singing this piece is important for me not only because it is such a powerful and moving piece of music. It also brings back the excitement of being just 22 and (unlike the young boys who went to war) having my whole life ahead of me. And it reminds me that the friends I’ve made through music are among the best friends I’ve ever made – friendships that have been sustained for nearly 30 years.
I’ve sung War Requiem once since that Birmingham concert, in 1995 with Franz Welser-Most conducting. But I’m really looking forward to Crouch End Festival Chorus perform it, as I know we’ve had the luxury of more time on rehearsing it than many of the bigger choirs would allow.
So maybe I will finally, finally get that tricky bit on page 155 right!
19 September 2009
Annmarie O’Callaghan
I was lucky enough to be taught singing by Nancy Evans, the original Nancy in Albert Herring, and sometime muse to Benjamin Britten. He wrote Charm of Lullabies for her, and I think she was one of the original Lucretias along with Kathleen Ferrier and Janet Baker. Nancy’s second husband was Eric Crozier, who wrote libretti for Britten. Anyway, they were both heavily involved in Aldeburgh Festival, but not War Requiem to my knowledge.
I have a book “Time and Concord” compiled by Jenni Wake-Walker, which is a collection of Aldeburgh Festival recollections. What I have written below is a snippet from Galina Vishnevskaya’s contribution which is an extract from her autobiography “Galina” published by Hodder and Stoughton.
GV: “I first met Benjamin Britten in the summer of 1961 when I came to England for the Aldeburgh Festival. It was at my solo concert in the Jubilee Hall, with Slava (Rostropovitch, her husband) accompanying me, that Britten heard me sing for the first time. He must have thought I was a madwoman. Indeed, thinking back, I can’t believe such a programme was possible. In addition to songs by Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Richard Strauss and Schumann, plus arias from Norma, Manon Lescaut, La Forza and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, for dessert I sang Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death.
“After the concert Britten came up to me, showered me with compliments and said he was particularly glad he had heard me right at that moment because he had begun to write his War Requiem and now wanted to write in a part for me. He added that this composition, which was a call for peace, would bring together representatives of the three nations that had suffered most during the war: an Englishman, Peter Pears; a German, Dietrich Fischer-Diskau; and a Russian, myself. I shall never forget the date of the premiere, 30 May 1962. On that day, instead of experiencing the thrill of taking part with all the others in that solemn event, I was sitting at home in Moscow, weeping bitter tears [having been refused permission to sing by the Soviet authorities].”