I love a nice requiem: sang in Verdi's, in purple polyester as a 15-year-old in a choir, revised for my finals to Fauré's, its plangent purity echoing my sad plight in being stuck inside, thrilled to Mozart's, as Tom Hulce's giggling Amadeus was laid, tragically, prematurely, to rest. But I'd never, until Sunday night, heard Benjamin Britten's, and I'd never seen Antonio Pappano. When he walked on to the stage of the Royal Albert Hall, a diminutive figure sandwiched between Thomas Hampson, a beefy baritone who bears a passing resemblance to Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ian Bostridge, a Rupert Brooke look-alike with the air of someone who might, at any moment, be sent to die – with honour, aquiline features and chiselled cheekbones intact – on Flanders' fields, he looked like a Southern peasant in a suit. When he left, an hour and a half later, he looked like a god.
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