War Requiem (disk 1)  (54:44)
	01	I. Requiem aeternam			Requiem aeternam			05:56
	02	What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?			What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?			03:37
	03	II. Dies irae			Dies irae			03:36
	04	Bugles sang			Bugles sang			02:33
	05	Liber scriptus proferetur			Liber scriptus proferetur			02:56
	06	Out there			Out there			01:56
	07	Recordare Jesu pie			Recordare Jesu pie			04:48
	08	Be slowly lifted up			Be slowly lifted up			01:52
	09	Dies irae			Dies irae			01:11
	10	Lacrimosa dies illa			Lacrimosa dies illa			01:54
	11	Move him into the sun			Move him into the sun			04:50
	12	III. Offertorium - Domine Jesu Christe			Domine Jesu Christe			03:30
	13	So Abram rose			So Abram rose			06:11
	14	IV. Sanctus - Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus			Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus			06:02
	15	After the blast of lightning			After the blast of lightning			03:52
War Requiem (disk 2)  (53:33)
	01	V. Agnus Dei - One Ever Hangs						03:45
	02	VI. Libera Me - Libera Me, Domine						07:37
	03	It Seemed That Out Of Battle I Escaped						09:34
	04	Let Us Sleep Now... In Paradisum						06:04
	05	Nocturne: I. On A Poet's Lips I Slept						03:23
	06	Nocturne: II. Below The Thunders Of The Upper Deep						03:29
	07	Nocturne: III. Encincur'd With A Twine Of Leaves						02:24
	08	Nocturne: IV. Midnight's Bell Goes Ting, Ting, Ting						02:21
	09	Nocturne: V. But That Night Whem On My Bad I Lay						03:14
	10	Nocturne: VI. She Sleeps On Soft, Last Breaths						03:59
	11	Nocturne: VII. What Is More gentle Than A Wind In Summer ?						03:31
	12	Nocturne: VIII. When Most I Wink, Then Do Mine Eyes best See						04:12

Lord Benjamin Britten
Country England
Birth Nov 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk, England
Death Dec 4, 1976 in Aldeburgh, England
Period Modern

Biography
With the arrival of Benjamin Britten on the international music scene, many felt that English music gained its greatest genius since Purcell. A composer of wide-ranging talents, Britten found in the human voice an especial source of inspiration, an affinity that resulted in a remarkable body of work, ranging from operas like Peter Grimes (1944 - 45) and Death in Venice (1973) to song cycles like the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings (1943) to the massive choral work War Requiem (1961). He also produced much music for orchestra and chamber ensembles, including symphonies, concerti, and chamber and solo works.
Britten's father was a prosperous oral surgeon in the town of Lowestoft, Suffolk; his mother was a leader in the local choral society. When Benjamin's musical aptitude became evident, the family engaged composer Frank Bridge to supervise his musical education. Bridge's tutelage was one of the formative and lasting influences on Britten's compositional development; Britten eventually paid tribute to his teacher in his Op. 10, the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge (1937). Britten's formal training also included studies at the Royal College of Music (1930 - 33).

Upon graduation from the RCM, Britten obtained a position scoring documentaries (on prosaic themes like "Sorting Office") for the Royal Post Office film unit. Working on a tight budget, he learned how to extract the maximum variety of color and musical effectiveness from the smallest combinations of instruments, producing dozens of such scores from 1935 to 1938. He rapidly emerged as the most promising British composer of his generation and entered into collaborative relationships that exerted a profound influence upon his creative life. Among the most important of his professional associates were literary figures like W. H. Auden, and later, E. M. Forster. None, however, played as central a role in Britten's life as the tenor Peter Pears, who was Britten's closest intimate, both personally and professionally, from the late 1930s to the composer's death. Pears' voice inspired a number of Britten's vocal cycles and opera roles, and the two often joined forces in song recitals and, from 1948, in the organization and administration of the Aldeburgh Festival.

A steadfast pacifist, Britten left England in 1939 as war loomed over Europe. He spent four years in the United States and Canada, his compositional pace barely slackening, as evidenced by the production of works like the Sinfonia da Requiem (1940), the song cycle Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (1940), and his first effort for the stage, Paul Bunyan (1940 - 41). Eventually, the poetry of George Crabbe drew Britten back to England. With a Koussevitzky Commission backing him, the composer wrote the enormously successful opera Peter Grimes (1944 - 45), which marked the greatest turning point in his career. His fame secure, Britten over the next several decades wrote a dozen more operas, several of which -- Albert Herring (1947), Billy Budd (1951), The Turn of the Screw (1954), A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Death in Venice (1973) -- became instant and permanent fixtures of the repertoire. He also continued to produce much vocal, orchestral, and chamber music, including Songs and Proverbs of William Blake (1965), the three Cello Suites (1961 - 64) and the Cello Symphony (1963), written for Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Third String Quartet (1975).

Britten suffered a stroke during heart surgery in 1971, which resulted in something of a slowdown in his creative activities. Nonetheless, he continued to compose until his death in 1976, at which time he was recognized as one of the principal musical figures of the twentieth century. -- Michael Rodman



War Requiem, for soprano, tenor, baritone, boys' voices, chorus, chamber orchestra, orchestra & organ, Op. 66
Composition Date 1961

Description
Benjamin Britten spent most of the 1950s adding to a string of successful operas that had begun with Peter Grimes in the mid-1940s. Though he took a brief sojourn from opera to write the War Requiem, it is clear that the dramatic spirit that fueled his operatic efforts carried over into this work, his most monumental effort. While the Requiem is in its own way even more overtly theatrical than Verdi's well-known Requiem (described by Hans von Bulow as "an opera in ecclesiastical guise"), it cannot properly be thought of as an opera without staging. The musical procedures of Britten's operas were quite well established by 1961, and the War Requiem really has little to do with them. The work instead relies on simple, sectional musical means to convey a pattern of thought that even listeners unfamiliar with the often confusing realm of mid-twentieth century music can follow with little trouble.
Indeed, such an immediately accessible idiom was one of the composer's basic goals when he set himself to interpolating the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen (killed in action just one week before the Armistice of 1918) into the traditional Requiem scheme. The War Requiem is by no means pure music, nor could its various sections conceivably stand alone. It is a work with a basic human message, simple and uncontrived and utterly reliant on the distribution of textual materials (separate instrumental and vocal forces are assigned to the two disparate bodies of text) to achieve its impact. The work attained an almost immediate rapport with English-speaking audiences around the world after its May 9, 1962, premiere at the new Coventry Cathedral, and to many it remains Britten's supreme achievement.

On a structural level, the War Requiem is massive, its six large movements, each comprising several smaller sections, of some 90 minutes' total duration. From the bells and chantlike chorus in the opening bars of the Requiem aeternam, Britten's use of the tritone as a basic unifying device is obvious. A boys' choir breaks in with the Te decet hymnus, only to be interrupted by Owen's poem "What passing-bells" set as a tenor solo. (The solo tenor and baritone sing all the poetic texts.) The restless tritone gives way to a moment of temporary repose at the end of this first movement, which resolves on an F major chord.

The Dies Irae, containing no fewer than ten separate subsections, is the longest of the six movements, while the following Offertorium and Sanctus together comprise only six sections of music. The Dies Irae closes with a quiet choral Pie Jesu, while the Sanctus is the only movement to end with one of Owen's poems, the grim baritone solo "After the blast of lightning." Chillingly, the closing Dona nobis pacem (Grant us peace) of the following Agnus Dei is sung not by the chorus, as might be expected, but rather by the anguished tenor soloist. At the end of the final Libera me, however, some peace, or at least rest, is reached at last as the unaccompanied chorus finds the strength, after a lengthy and tortured tumult, to resolve the burdensome tritone to the sonorous F major chord of the final "Amen." -- Blair Johnston