They've been kept apart for years due to COVID, but at last the West Australian and Tasmanian symphony orchestra choruses are coming together to perform Benjamin Britten's monumental peace anthem, a work considered as relevant now as it was when it debuted in the early 1960s.
When the house lights go down in the Perth Concert Hall on Friday night, it will be a special moment for two choirs from opposite sides of the country.The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus will join the West Australian Symphony Orchestra Chorus to perform Britten's War Requiem, a monumental anthem for peace, in Perth this weekend
Now, they are back together to sing a monumental anthem for peace under the baton of WASO's principal conductor Asher Fisch. Composer Benjamin Britten combined the Latin mass for the dead text with nine poems by English poet Wilfred Owen, who died in battle in World War I. Fisch — who grew up in Israel where war and conflict has been long-running — said "whenever there's a war, a war requiem is a good cultural way to remind us of the horrors of war".He said Britten's work also had a deeper significance, one that was not widely recognised.
O'Neil and Greco will sing the poems with a chamber orchestra, and Perroni and the chorus will sing with the full orchestra of more than 100 players. Britten, a pacifist, wrote the requiem with three soloists in mind: English tenor Peter Pears, German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya.
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