Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima - Roderick Williams Performer Diary

(September 2025)

Phoenix Hall in Hiroshima’s Peace Park plays host to a uniquely poignant performance of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem on 6 September 2025, observing 80 years since the atomic bombing of the city. Japanese and British performers combine for the event, with soloists Hiromi Omura, James Gilchrist and Roderick Williams, the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and the NHK Hiroshima Children’s Chorus, conducted by Gavin Carr.

In a series of diary entries, we follow baritone soloist Roderick Williams as he reflects on his experience performing this powerful work in Hiroshima.

03 September 2025: Arriving in Hiroshima

After more than 15 hours in the air yesterday we have arrived here in Hiroshima. The choir has gone straight into rehearsal today while James Gilchrist and I have had the day free for our voices to recover from the journey, and for our brains gently to unscramble.

It is in the nature of being a freelance musician that one goes from project to project and so I can only really look forward to something in my diary in general terms. I must focus as much as possible on the project in hand. This event has been in my diary for a while and I have been looking forward to it, but I have not had much brain space to imagine in advance what it is going to be like.

Now that I’m here, a number of things are occurring to me. First of all, I have come to understand how much this project has meant to its instigator, conductor Gavin Carr. This has been a dream of his to achieve here in Hiroshima for decades. It has also been a huge undertaking to manage the logistics for 160 choir members to travel to Japan. The team at Specialised Travel agents under Tony Hastings have been working on it for at least four years. I have arrived therefore somewhat at the tail end of all this preparation and I’m coming to understand just how much has been invested in it from so many people.

In talking to various choir members during the travelling, I have come to realise just how excited people have been at the prospect of singing this piece in this city in this anniversary year. I am told that singers have come from all over the UK, not just from Bournemouth, and from further afield - Germany, the United States and even one chorister from Japan. Their sense of excitement has been inspiring and has given the project a sense of occasion that I hadn’t especially felt before arriving.

I am also delighted to meet our soprano soloist Hiromi who has travelled not from Japan but from her home in the Auvergne via Paris to be with us. She has never been to Hiroshima before nor has she sung this piece and so I’m interested to see this work through her eyes.

Nor has the symphony Orchestra played the music before. I am told that early rehearsals have been spectacularly good, the result clearly of much preparation. I am also told that the concert is a complete sell out which makes the occasion even more of an event. I have to admit I wasn’t sure how the Japanese audience would respond to this piece with its combination of Latin text and very particular English poetry. However, their sense of curiosity has certainly been expressed at the box office.

So far, I seem to be defeating jet lag and I’m looking forward to my first rehearsal with the orchestra tomorrow afternoon.

04 September: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and Rehearsals

Today began with a visit to the Peace Memorial Museum and the Peace Memorial Park in central Hiroshima, followed by my first rehearsal with the chamber orchestra in the afternoon.

We were guided around the gardens before visiting the museum and I found our guide’s understated, matter-of-fact presentation sobering. Many of the images inside the museum were pretty graphic and the mood inside was very sombre, despite the large number of tourists moving through. I was struck that there was no mood music piped inside the museum, which meant that Britten’s score was resounding inside my head as I made my tour.



During the afternoon rehearsal, these images came to mind sometimes unexpectedly. I found, for example, that the poem that begins “After the last blast of lightning in the East” caught me by surprise. I found myself unable to continue singing twice in a row, before I was able to gather myself and continue the rehearsal.

However, I was also struck by the different circumstances of the conflicts Britten and Wilfred Owen were describing, and the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. For one thing the poem in Strange Meeting describes a battlefield with two combatants meeting after death. Here in Hiroshima, I’m very much aware that this city was no battlefield. The American air crew had no contact with the people on whom they dropped the bomb. In fact, their journey was made with comparative ease. The people on the ground, however, were caught in the middle of their daily life, and the change from that city morning to a scene of total devastation was instant. In that respect the conflict described in Britten’s War Requiem is very different.

The playing of the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra is outstanding. The musicians have clearly prepared immaculately ahead of time, and this challenging score holds no fear for them. Rehearsing with Gavin and James yesterday was an absolute pleasure.

Gavin tells me he has in the past sung the baritone solo all over the world and I am struck that the piece has had much more impact globally than I had previously thought. I am much intrigued to see how this piece goes down here in Hiroshima on Saturday.

05 September: Benjamin Britten's music in Japan

Today we had our first rehearsal in the actual venue right next door to the Peace Memorial Museum. During the morning James Gilchrist, my wife Miranda, and I made a visit to the elementary school just round the corner from our hotel, which was one of the few buildings that miraculously managed to survive the atomic bomb blast. The school became an emergency refuge soon after the devastation, and there are still inscriptions on the walls from people trying to find or leave news about family members and their whereabouts. It’s extraordinary to think that anybody could have survived the blast but, again miraculously, three children did survive who happened to be changing their shoes in the school’s basement. Their stories and the stories of other survivors have been both harrowing and inspiring.

In the afternoon, we rehearsed with the orchestra in the venue. I was struck how several moments, not just the final ‘gamelan’ chorus of resolution, but other moments in the score sound oriental, perhaps even Japanese. One such moment is the bassoon solo in the Abraham and Isaac section. Gavin was asking the marvellous bassoon player to give the solo as much character as possible and it called to my mind images of kabuki theatre characters. The old man is a stock character and I think Britten captures this perfectly. It could be the soundtrack to a black-and-white Japanese film or live theatre.

In a later poem, Wilfred Owen personifies Age as a white haired old man and the Earth as a sorrowful, exhausted woman. This brought to mind again images from Japanese theatre and I found online pictures of masks used in Japanese Noh theatre.

I know that Benjamin Britten was intrigued by the music of the Far East and was even commissioned by Japanese orchestras, but it begins to occur to me as I listen to the music here in Japan just how Japanese some sections sound.

Stay tuned for more diary updates...

Roderick Williams, 2025

> Find out more about the concert
> Find out more about Benjamin Britten: War Requiem

Header Headshot Photograph by Theo Williams. Diary Photographs by Roderick Williams.

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