What passing bells for those who die as cattle? Another chill November morning of last posts and reveilles at the Cenotaph - and, in the evening, Britten's War Requiem at the Albert Hall. The 90th Remembrance Sunday was marked by a particularly challenging performance in which Antonio Pappano conducted the Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House.

Bugles sang, not only from Wilfred Owen's sad shires, but with trumpets and trombones resonating round the dome. Voices of boys, in this case the excellent Tiffin Boys' Choir, raised their sacrifice of prayer high up in the gallery; and the great organ blasted out its Libera me. The size and shape of the auditorium inevitably suffocated much of the finer detail of Britten's score. But Pappano's fine judgment of proportion and pacing energised the work's innermost power.

Ian Bostridge has sung the War Requiem no fewer than 50 times. Not only do Britten's responses to Owen's poetry lie deep within his consciousness, but the music, originally written for Peter Pears, also fits Bostridge's own vocal timbre and registers like a second skin. This was an outstanding performance, from the bullet-like articulation of the rifles' rapid rattle to the dull, plangent ache within every slowly arching phrase of Move him into the sun.

Thomas Hampson, too, has the steady, slow-burning measure of the work. Tall and focused, he seemed to embody the long black arm of the great gun with its cursing rage. And, after strutting out their syllables together in their death march, tenor and baritone seemed voices out of time and space in that last black tunnel of sleep.

If Bostridge and Hampson found just the “beauty, intensity and serenity” that Britten required of their roles, then the soprano Christine Brewer was mourner supreme in the Lacrimosa, creating a bel canto beauty of line in the Benedictus, before the great bells of the Hosanna swung from the voices of the Royal Opera Chorus, splendidly eloquent throughout.

The Royal Opera gives a further performance of the War Requiem in Symphony Hall, Birmingham, on March 21

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