I didn’t go to see the Britten War Requiem conducted by David Hill on Saturday. Not as you saw it, fellow students. This is because – as a ‘member of the press’ – I was sitting on the front row in the King’s College Chapel, snuggled up to the CUMS first violins and Jane Irwin, the soprano. Delightful as this was, mine was a singular experience: I was the only person under the age of 50 in the front three rows. The rest of you, clutching your £5 student tickets, were shunted into the unsighted seats on the other side of the organ screen. True, these tickets allow people to hear the concert who could not otherwise have done, but I’m not sure such seating arrangements would encourage them back.

Britten’s War Requiem is a magnificent twentieth-century work. The interweaving of Wilfred Owen’s poetry with text from the Latin requiem mass dramatises a story of war in a way that Carlos del Cueto’s excellent programme note calls ‘almost operatic’. Britten interchanges moments harnessing the might of hundreds of musicians with intimate solo conversations to staggering effect. When the chamber orchestral parts were engaging in a polyphonic warfare with tenor Andrew Staples or baritone Ashley Riches, whose voices complemented one another perfectly, I was convinced: this is brilliant. Similarly, when the massed college choirs united in the ‘Dies Irae’ chorus, I found myself overwhelmed by the War Requiem’s intensity. David Hill leapt around on his conductor’s podium drawing more and more from his enthusiastic performers.

But the second fortissimo chorus section in the ‘Dies’ lacked the intensity of the first. Where were the spat consonants of ‘confutatis maledictus’? While Britten’s writing dramatises the fiery doom of the wicked, the tenors and basses sounded like raucous schoolboys singing in the shower.

One of the most exciting things about the War Requiem is the contrast between the quiet small ensemble passages and the pianissimo from the whole orchestra and chorus. Each has a different quality. In this performance, the full orchestra and chorus pianos were timid rather than intense. For this reason, the opening took too long to become settled – unhelped by competing music from the 800th Anniversary Light Show outside.

All said, it was an excellent concert, and never better than when Andrew Staples was singing or when the unseen boys’ choir echoed through the chapel. Yet it lacked something. Certainly not atmosphere or tension, but polish. This was a performance put together in under a week. An astonishing feat, but I suspect a few hours more could have produced a triumph.