GRAMOPHONE Review: Britten Sinfonia da Requiem – City of Birmingham Symphony/Gražinytė-Tyla Orchestra

Capitalising on Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and the CBSO’s ‘Record of the Year’ triumph at this year’s Gramophone Awards this purely digital release – a growing trend – gives notice of a two-CD release (scheduled for March next year) entitled ‘The British Project’. Tippett’s A Child of Our Time, Walton and Holst in prospect.

As teaser’s go, Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem is a banger, conscientious objection hurled down with that thunderous opening chord where rasping trombones repeatedly underline the catastrophe of World War II. Britten’s precocious symphony (his first large-scale and purely orchestral utterance) has the angry air of a protest piece tempered with hope. It’s a young man’s piece, idealistic to a fault and to some extent an over-simplification of what war and peace actually mean – but my goodness does it flex muscle.

Gražinytė-Tyla and the CBSO tick all the boxes, the outer movements lavishly contrasting the melancholy of loss in the former (the plangent alto saxophone in the first is such a 20th century colour for mourning) with a kind of new dawn emerging from the shining climax of the latter. Between them is the most scarifyingly individual music in the piece – a ‘Day of Wrath’ whose ugly cynicism combines a dance of death of sorts with an almost comical slapstick. In fact Britten actually uses a slapstick (a favourite of his) in his percussion section culminating in a passage which is at once an evocation of convulsive death-throe spasms and a demonic snickering. The CBSO throw it off with all due virtuosity and sonically the DG engineering is exceptional.

‘The British Project’ is go.