Giulini conducts the War Requiem

Benjamin Britten

Royal Albert Hall, London · 1969

Composer: Benjamin Britten
Singer: Peter Pears, Hans Wilbrink, Stefania Woytowicz
Years: 1969
Genre: Choral concert
Place of Performance: Royal Albert Hall, London
Ensemble: Melos Ensemble, New Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor: Benjamin Britten, Carlo Maria Giulini

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Music Preserved · Giulini War Requiem

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This landmark performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem brings together an exceptional assembly of international forces at the Royal Albert Hall. The New Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus are led by the visionary Italian maestro Carlo Maria Giulini. In a rare and deeply collaborative arrangement, the composer Benjamin Britten himself shares the podium, directing the intimate chamber sequences with the Melos Ensemble.

Commissioned to mark the 1962 consecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral —which had been obliterated by incendiary bombing during the Second World War —the War Requiem stands as the twentieth century’s definitive musical statement on the futility of conflict. Britten, a lifelong and passionate pacifist, constructed the work not merely as a liturgical memorial, but as a searing, universal warning.

The structural blueprint of the masterpiece is a brilliant, devastating juxtaposition. Britten interweaves the ancient Latin Missa pro defunctis (Mass for the Dead) with the stark, visceral trench poetry of Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action in 1918 just one week before the World War I armistice. Prefacing the musical score are Owen’s own famous words:

“My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity. All a poet can do is warn.”

While Britten’s historic 1963 studio recording remains a benchmark, this live performance offers a fundamentally fresh and intensely theatrical reading, in which Giulini infuses the Latin choruses with an operatic, blistering intensity that highlights Britten’s musical lineage to Verdi’s Requiem.

The vocal soloists comprise a brilliant international triumvirate: Peter Pears (tenor) was Britten’s partner and muse, for whom the individualistic, expressive tenor part was directly composed; Stephania Woytowicz (soprano) was an acclaimed Polish dramatic soprano, bringing a searing, luminous intensity to the massive choral movements; and Hans Wilbrink (baritone) was a distinguished Dutch baritone, capturing the quiet, haunting heartbreak of Owen’s soldierly monologues. The formidable vocal architecture is completed by the New Philharmonia Chorus (prepared by Wilhelm Pitz) and the youth voices of the Wandsworth School Boys’ Choir.

Giulini’s 1969 live performance at the Royal Albert Hall stands as one of the few interpretations that breaks free from the shadow of Britten’s definitive 1963 Decca studio recording. While Britten’s studio recording is characterized by a razor-sharp, analytical clarity and a architectural calculation, Giulini introduces an operatic, humanistic, and viscerally theatrical intensity.

The core interpretive differences between the two accounts manifest in several distinct areas. Giulini treats the Latin Mass text with the same biting, apocalyptic terror and deep lyricism that he famously brought to Verdi’s Requiem. The rhythmic drive under his hands is histrionically taut, pushing the orchestra to moments of wild, shattering aggression. As a composer-conductor, Britten prioritized structural precision, strict metronomic control, and clarity of individual lines. His interpretation is colder, more objective, and deeply calculated to maximize the friction of his harmonic dissonances.

In the great climax of the Libera me, under Giulini the great percussive build-up in the final movement is a chaotic, earth-shattering cataclysm. He lets the orchestra rip with an unbridled fury that mirrors a literal battlefield bombardment, making the ensuing silence into the “Strange Meeting” feel like a shell-shocked afterlife. Britten handles this massive climax with tighter reins. The panic is carefully measured, prioritizing the balance between the thunderous percussion and the strained vocal entries over raw sonic abandon.

Recorded live, Giulini’s account benefits from the vast, rolling acoustic of the Royal Albert Hall, which adds a natural, grand-scale perspective to the choirs. The performance carries an electric, “caught-on-the-wing” tension, though it inevitably includes minor live blemishes and acoustic “bleed” between the ensembles. For Britten, producer John Culshaw explicitly engineered the 1963 studio recording at Kingsway Hall to sound like three distinct, clinically separated spatial planes. It is immaculate, dry, and surgically clean, presenting the work as a flawless musical monument rather than a spontaneous dramatic event.

Despite these macro-differences, the chamber orchestra sequences remain remarkably consistent. This is because Britten himself was on the podium alongside Giulini to conduct the Melos Ensemble for the Owen poems. Consequently, the individual soldier sequences maintain Britten’s signature intimacy and specific phrasing, but they are surrounded by a much more volcanic, Italianate choral framework steered by Giulini.

Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976)

War Requiem

Requiem aeternam
1. Requiem aeternam (chorus and boys’ choir)
2. “What passing bells” (tenor solo) – “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
3. Kyrie eleison (chorus)
Dies irae
1. Dies irae (chorus)
2. “Bugles sang” (baritone solo) – Owen’s “But I was Looking at the Permanent Stars”
3. Liber scriptus (soprano solo and semi-chorus)
4. “Out there, we walked quite friendly up to death” (tenor and baritone soli) – Owen’s “The Next War”
5. Recordare (women’s chorus)
6. Confutatis (men’s chorus)
7. “Be slowly lifted up” (baritone solo) – Owen’s “Sonnet on Seeing a Piece of our Heavy Artillery Brought into Action”
8. Reprise of Dies irae (chorus)
9. Lacrimosa (soprano and chorus) interspersed with “Move him, move him” (tenor solo) – Owen’s “Futility”
Offertorium
1. Domine Jesu Christe (boys’ choir)
2. Sed signifer sanctus (chorus)
3. Quam olim Abrahae (chorus)
4. Isaac and Abram (tenor and baritone soli) – Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”
5. Hostias et preces tibi (boys’ choir)
6. Reprise of Quam olim Abrahae (chorus)
Sanctus
1. Sanctus and Benedictus (soprano solo and chorus)
2. “After the blast of lightning” (baritone solo) – Owen’s “The End”
Agnus Dei
1. Agnus Dei (chorus) interspersed with “One ever hangs” (chorus; tenor solo) – Owen’s “At a Calvary near the Ancre”
Libera me
1. Libera me (soprano solo and chorus)
2. Strange Meeting (“It seemed that out of battle I escaped”) (tenor and baritone soli) – Owen’s “Strange Meeting”
3. In paradisum (organ, boys’ chorus, soprano and mixed chorus)
4. Conclusion – Requiem Aeternam and Requiescant in Pace (organ, boys’ choir and mixed chorus.

This recording

This recording was made from a relay of a concert given at the Royal Albert Hall on 6 April 1969.

The recording is in the Tolansky-Tschaikov Collection at Music Preserved.

Unfortunately there is some “echo” audible in the background during this recording, due to a fault on the original tape.

Performers

Soprano Stefania Woytowicz
Tenor Peter Pears
Baritone Hans Wilbrink
New Philharmonia Chorus
Wandsworth School Boys' Choir
Melos Ensemble
New Philharmonia Orchestra
Conductor (Melos Ensemble) Benjamin Britten
Conductor Carlo-Maria Giulini

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