Massive War Requiem poignant season finale

A week after the 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, Benjamin Britten’s massive War Requiem can show the shocking and shorn face of combat. In light of events in Sierra Leone, Kosovo and Sri Lanka, the Mass of the dead becomes even more poignant, more touchable, more today. And that is the effect Christopher Zimmerman, music director for the Bangor Symphony Orchestra, hoped to achieve in scheduling this piece as the finale to the BSO regular season.

Zimmerman joined the BSO with a break-off chamber orchestra, the University of Maine Singers, the Oratorio Society, St. John’s Episcopal Youth Choir and three soloists for Friday and Saturday concerts at the Maine Center for the Arts.

The effect Saturday was, indeed, shattering — with more than 270 insistent performers onstage, three diligent soloists and the St. John’s Choir in the balcony singing as beautifully and hauntingly as might the angels in Heaven.

If any note had been less intense or any beat less driving, the pounding profundity of Britten’s work would have been lost. But Zimmerman, bolstered by the earlier of work of directors Ludlow Hallman of the Oratorio Society, Dennis Cox of the University of Maine Singers, and Fred Jones of the choir, found admirable balance for the many elements of this piece.

One of the most important large-scale choral works written by an English composer, the War Requiem fuses the traditional Latin Mass for the dead and the poetry of Wilfred Owen, whose stark vision of trench warfare is emotional. While choruses and a single soprano perform the Mass, a tenor and baritone present nine of Owen’s war poems.

At Saturday’s performance, the soloists began with taut voices. But quickly into the 90-minute production, the tones became eery, poetic and melancholy.

Tenor Brad Diamond and baritone Philip Cutlip were gorgeously matched in “The Parable of the Old Men and the Young,” Owen’s less sparing version of the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. Bonnie Scarpelli’s shining moments came in the Sanctus, when she found vivid and agile tones.

The final movement, the Libera Me, was notably expressive. After the chorus petitions for deliverance from eternal death, there is Owen’s chilling poem “Strange Meeting,” a conversation of two dead soldiers. Filled with distressing realizations of wartime degradation, the ghosts — who were enemies in life — end with the plea: “Let us sleep now.” Diamond and Cutlip were entirely coordinated in this unbearable proclamation that underscores Britten’s hardcore pacifism.

Earlier in his life, Britten had been a conscientious objector, sailing in 1942 from America to wartime England. The War Requiem, which was first performed in 1962, takes those politics to a more relentless level: to art.

In choosing to present this piece, Zimmerman had more to balance than the rich and wrenching musical elements in Britten’s War Requiem. He had the monumental task of blending community and professional performers in a complicated text. This he did gracefully. Under his direction, the guest singers and the BSO — particularly the percussion section — performed reliably and powerfully.