“As the most horrific war in Europe since World War II rages, the Boston Symphony Orchestra with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus will be performing perhaps the most powerful anti-war statement ever written by a European composer: Benjamin Britten’s ‘War Requiem,’ ” writes Arun Rath in Friday’s (4/1) WGBH (Boston). “The piece was written in the shadow of World War II…. It was first performed in the United States in 1963, … by the BSO.” Anthony Fogg, vice president of artistic planning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, states, “Benjamin Britten … was commissioned to write a work for the reopening of Coventry Cathedral, which had been seriously damaged … [It] was rebuilt and opened in 1962 with this performance… He decided that it would be a statement about the senselessness and the terrible destruction of war [combining] the text of the Latin mass for the dead [and] poetry by the First World War poet Wilfred Owen…. In the original conception, Britten wanted the soloists to be a Russian soprano, an English tenor, a German baritone—so representing the warring factions who were being brought together…. We’re all aware of just how incredible the timing is that we’re doing this piece … against the backdrop of this terrible war.”
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