Benjamin Britten
WAR REQUIEM
HIROSHIMA 2025
It all began with an idea: to bring Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem to Hiroshima for the first time since the work’s premiere in 1962. Through the alchemy of piece and place, this 80th commemoration of the dropping of the atom bomb resonated deeply with performers and audience alike. Bringing 145 singers from the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and throughout the UK together with the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra and NHK Hiroshima Children’s Choir, we melded through this extraordinary music into one Voice for Peace.
We haven’t attained innocence- there can be no more innocence - but we can reconcile, and we can find peace, together.
BENJAMIN BRITTEN
WAR REQUIEM
Saturday 6th September, 2025
Phoenix Hall, Peace Memorial Park, Hiroshima
Hiromi Omura ~ Soprano
James Gilchrist ~ Tenor
Roderick Williams ~ Baritone
Bournemouth Symphony Chorus
Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra
NHK Hiroshima Children’s Choir
Gavin Carr ~ Conductor
INTRODUCTION
By Gavin Carr
Of all the great musical works born of the twentieth century, Britten’s War Requiem must rank with those
most aligned with the terrors and inhumanities of the era. Wilfred Owen’s haunting phrase, “My subject is
War, and the pity of War” is the emblem of the piece, and it was surely Owen’s profound sense of compassion
that inspired Britten, as he brought his great work together to commemorate the devastation of Coventry and
the rising from the ashes of a marvellous new cathedral.
Many years ago, the idea of this project came to me: to find a way to align the War Requiem with the meaning
that Hiroshima holds for all of us in the West, as a symbol both of man’s inhumanity to man, and of the power
of transformation through compassion and forgiveness. To bring this work to the very epicentre of the atomic
explosion, to the Peace Memorial Park itself, and there to make an act of atonement, literally at-one-ment, in
bringing all our energies together to perform this great work of compassion and humanity in the very heart of
Hiroshima…this was my idea, all those years ago.
Now the Hiroshima War Requiem project has attained its end. On Saturday 6th September, 2025, marking
eighty years since the dropping of the bomb, we performed the work in the Phoenix Hall in the Peace
Memorial Park, bringing this great work to Hiroshima for the very first time.
“Gavin Carr’s conducting ignited the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, and the anger towards war and the prayers for the victims resonated deeply. This performance was deeply human.” Yuki Iwano (music critic)
“In Hiroshima, a long silence was followed by an intense ovation. The heightened circumstances of the performance…sharpened almost every aspect of the playing and singing to make it frighteningly urgent….The applause continued long after the orchestra had left the stage. Members of the chorus were visibly moved. Carr’s audio diary [for the project] records his feelings at the work’s close: “We haven’t attained innocence- there can be no more innocence - but we can reconcile, and we can find peace, together.”" Ben Poore, VAN Magazine