 | This montage from our Podcast Vault revisits a post from November 14, 2014. It can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast173 |
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This week’s
throwback montage concludes our week-long “War and Peace” series with a complete
performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem; a work that was also featured
(in part) in our World War II montage yesterday.
Britten was
an avowed pacifist, and even registered as a conscientious objector in his
homeland when he returned from a prolonged self-exile in 1942. Still, including
his Ballad of Heroes we featured in our Remembrance Day montage, he left a
number of works dedicated to the theme of war, but mostly on the human cost of
war, and the War Requiem us his most enduring and brilliant example – as I
noted in the original musing from 2014.
Our bonus track is a work from the early days of World War II, during the period Britten and his longtime companion Peter Pears found refuge (from homophobic persecution and the war in Britain) in North America. This Canadian Carnival (in French, Kermesse Canadienne) is a work that is intended as a playful concert overture, with tinges of French-Canadian folklore and I’d argue sounds a lot like Copland’s Salon Mexico.
I think you
will (still) love this music too.
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