Jeff Watts Sings Britten with SFCS
One Sunday morning when I was seven, I told my mother I wanted to sing with the church choir, which was made up of men and boys in the English choral tradition. I've been singing ever since, although not in a ruffed collar. I wore green tights once, and an elaborate kimono for one production…
I've met many wonderful people and wonderful musicians. I met my wife Meredith in the Pomona College Glee Clubs. We sang together in several groups including the S.F. Symphony Chorus. Unfortunately there simply isn't enough time to do everything you want to do; Meredith eventually dropped out of choral singing.
Friends in various choruses encouraged her to start singing again but that didn't get anywhere until this summer, when the tipping point was Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem", the summer concert of the San Francisco Choral Society.
We love this piece! The first year we moved to San Francisco, we performed it with the Winifred Baker Chorale. We were blown away - the piece is incredible. Meredith couldn't resist the opportunity to sing it again.
Last month I learned Janet Corah sang in that performance too. It isn't surprising I hadn't realized that, because the Winifred Baker Chorale was somewhat schizophrenic. Half the chorus rehearsed in San Francisco and half rehearsed in Marin, coming together for performance week. Janet was in the Marin cohort.
Mer was anxious about the audition because she felt pretty rusty, so she worked with Kristin Womack to help knock the rust off the pipes. It worked - she passed the audition and we started rehearsing.
Benjamin Britten composed the War Requiem in 1962 for the re-consecration of Coventry Cathedral, which was bombed and destroyed during WWII. The text is a mash-up of the Latin mass for the dead, and poems of Wilfred Owen, the leading poet of WWI. Owen wrote poems about trench warfare and the slaughter of his generation. After treatment for shell shock, Owen chose to return to the front, where he died a week before the war ended.
Britten divides his forces in three.
- The Latin mass is set for orchestra, chorus, and soprano soloist.
- A children's chorus innocently sings some of the prayers.
- Owen's poetry is set for chamber orchestra with tenor and baritone soloists.
The juxtapositions are heart wrenching. One example is in the offertory (the point in the service when the congregation offers gifts to the church). The children pray that the dead will be delivered from the inferno and the lion's mouth. The chorus prays that the dead will be brought into the light, as was promised to Abraham and his seed. Here is interpolated a poem that tells the story of Abraham and Isaac, the ultimate offering, but this version goes terribly wrong.
Britten rarely lets us sit back and listen to the pretty music (with the exception of the Recordare). His music does not sound especially dissonant, but he uses the harmonic ambiguity of whole tone scales, and a C-F# tritone that resolves in different ways, to keep us on edge.
The piece was first performed in 1962 with Britten as one of the conductors. He chose soloists from three countries ravaged by the war - Peter Pears (England), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Germany) and Galina Vishnevskaya (Russia). (The USSR prevented Vishnevskaya from traveling to the first performance but she sang on the first recording the next year.)
Andy Stewart notes "I heard the first performance of this, broadcast on BBC radio from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral in May, 1962. It is an absolutely stunning work, if anything more relevant to the present-day US than it was to early 1960s Britain."
You need serious conducting chops to bring this off successfully and Bob Geary was up to the job. It helped that he did this piece before, with the SFCS in 1999. There was no anxiety about balancing with the orchestra - the chorus had more than 170 singers on stage. I take my hat off to SFCS - I really enjoyed singing with SFCS and working with Bob. You can read the review in SF Classical Voice here: Silencing the Guns of War. I talked up PME and maybe that will bear fruit. (The last time I sang with SFCS, Paul Keaton joined PME.)
Sometimes we don't get respect from those who know us best. Bob told us about the notes his wife gave him after the last dress rehearsal. He had become more and more animated in conducting the sections where the intensity peaks. His wife told him he was starting to resemble Cro-Magnon man and, although a great conductor might get away with it, he was a good conductor and it wouldn't work.
Bob was put to the test near the start of the first movement in the Friday performance. That all-important C-F# tritone is played on the tubular bells at several key moments and the chorus depends on it to get the pitch. The percussionist seemed to be having a little trouble counting to 4. One time Bob gave a big cue on the 4th beat of the measure and nothing happened. No problem - Bob smoothly added a 5th beat to the measure and gave the cue again!
One thing I particularly love about singing with PME is the wide variety of music we perform. As Jim Hale observed, if you aren't in PME you don't understand how many different things we do. That said, there is a special thrill in performing a big symphonic work. We experienced some of that this year when we did Beethoven's 9th with NVS; I was delighted to get another fix this summer. It was wonderful to perform with Meredith again, and it was wonderful to sing the Britten again.
-Jeff Watts
Update Aug 8th 2PM:
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Comment from Nette:
Thanks for this Jeff. The one time I've done the War Requiem was with the SF Symphony, Kurt Masur conducting. The most incredible moment came in the first rehearsal with chorus and orchestra. We weren't bringing the intensity of emotion that Maestro Masur wanted for the piece, so after several pointed remarks, he put his baton down and spoke quietly of war. He was drafted into the German army as a young teen (I seem to recall he was only 15), toward the very end of WWII. Only 24 members of his company, all of whom were under 20, lived through the end of the war. THAT is what war meant to him, that is what the War Requiem should portray, and Davies Symphony Hall was utterly silent as he finished. He picked his baton up, gave the downbeat, and we made real music. What a humbling experience...
