Giancarlo Guerrero likes to end the Nashville Symphony’s final classical program of the season with a major choral work. The arrangement provides a bit of spectacle and also allows the orchestra to showcase its splendid, 200-plus-voice mixed chorus.
For the orchestra’s final program over the weekend at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, Guerrero led his forces in a rich, colorful rendition of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. The performance was a nod to two anniversaries: the composer’s centennial, which occupied orchestras and opera houses around the world last season; and the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War’s end.
Britten composed his War Requiem for the 1962 dedication of the new Coventry Cathedral, a landmark that had been destroyed by Luftwaffe bombing during World War II. War was a deeply personal topic for Britten. The composer was a lifelong pacifist, and during the Second World War, Britten and his partner, the renowned English tenor Peter Pears, were conscientious objectors.
Interestingly, Britten found an ingenious way to channel his antiwar sentiments into the requiem. He assigned the selections from the Latin liturgy, derived from the traditional Roman Catholic Mass for the dead, to a boys’ choir, who are to sing like angels on high. The tenor and baritone soloists, meanwhile, sing verse from the antiwar poems of Wilfred Owen, the English poet killed at the Western Front a week before the armistice that ended the First World War. So in a sense, what Britten fashioned was really an antiwar requiem.
For his part, Guerrero presented as fine a rendition of the requiem as you’d likely hear anywhere. He tapped one of the world’s leading Britten interpreters, Anthony Dean Griffey, to sing the tenor part. On Friday, Griffey sang Owen’s poetry with aching sensitivity and a sweet, lyrical voice. The other soloists, baritone Phillip Addis and soprano Erin Wall, were equally strong. Addis sang with a beautifully inflected voice that was as rich and dark as chocolate; Wall sang with a lustrous instrument that was plush in its middle register but a bit steely in its high range.
Guerrero had the boys of the Blair Children’s Chorus, who were expertly led by Mary Biddlecombe, sing unseen from one of the hall’s rear loge boxes. The effect was like hearing incorporeal beings singing with preternatural purity. The Nashville Symphony Chorus, which was excellently prepared by its director, Kelly Corcoran, sang with controlled beauty and clarity all evening. Guerrero’s conducting was incisive but also beautifully paced, which created an atmosphere of meditative gentleness that the audience will not soon forget.
