English National Opera will be marking the centenary of the WWI Armistice with a staging of Britten’s WAR REQUIEM at their West End home, The Coliseum Theatre, on St Martin’s Lane.
It’s a musical setting by Benjamin Britten of texts from the Missa pro defunctis and the words of Great War poet, Wilfred Owen. And for its first ever staging ENO Artistic Director Daniel Kramer will collaborate with Turner Prize-winning German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in what they’re describing as ”a unique fusion of music, theatre and visual arts paying testament to the complexities of war”.
ENO remind us that “Britten’s 1962 choral masterpiece uses the poetry of Wilfred Owen, killed in action a week before the Armistice was signed, alongside the traditional Latin Mass for the Dead to create a thoroughly modern yet timeless outcry against violence and war”.
The ENO Chorus will be joined by the international ensemble from ENO’s Porgy and Bess and the Finchley Children’s Music Group as well as soloists, Roderick Williams, Emma Bell and David Butt Philip.
Designer Wolfgang Tillmans is the first photographer to win the Turner Prize in 2000. The press release describes him as “known for his ability to form extraordinary and perceptive images out of the everyday, as well as his the strong social and political voice running through his work, as seen in his hugely acclaimed 2017 Tate Modern exhibition”.
Tillmans comments: “Britten’s War Requiem is universal, and we wanted to put its contemporaneity into focus. In my research again and again I came across the importance of children and youth: playing war and training for war cannot be separated. Britten wrote War Requiem in the spirit of pacifism: what has been forgotten is how much of the rhetoric immediately after the Second World War was about reconciliation between nations, but today we often remember only our own nation’s dead. It was great to work on the production with Daniel Kramer, both in terms of deciding what was there on stage and crucially what would not be there: the look of it is as much about what you can’t see as what you can."
Daniel Kramer has been Artistic Director of English National Opera since August 2016 and critics have been scathing about his recent work there.
Let’s hope he has better luck with, what promises to be, a sombre yet powerful evening of world class singing and striking imagery.
War Requiem opens Friday 16 November at 7.30pm at the London Coliseum for 6 performances: 16, 22, 27, 29 November and 04 and 07 December at 7.30pm
With Halloween fast approaching there’s plenty of opportunities to enjoy a spine tingling night in the West End.