Review Text
2018 release. November 11th brings the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Marking this momentous occasion, Ian Bostridge and Antonio Pappano, well-established as a masterly tenor-piano duo on Warner Classics, have assembled Requiem. This program of 19 songs spans almost 50 years, from the final decade of the 19th century to the height of World War II. Gustav Mahler and Kurt Weill are joined by two composers of both promise and achievement whose lives were cut short by the Great War, the Englishman George Butterworth (1885-1916) and the German Rudi Stephan (1887-1915). Ian Bostridge points out that the songs in Requiem were not directly inspired by the First World War. Some of them deal with the subject of war, while others take up such poetic themes as erotic love and the passing of time.
