After the damage suffered by Britain’s Coventry Cathedral during World War II bombing raids had been repaired, the ancient structure was reconsecrated in 1961. Benjamin Britten wrote his “War Requiem” for the occasion, a powerful 90-minute memorial that honors the dead of both world wars and offers an eloquent musical and poetic plea for peace.

Some of that eloquence registered strongly in Davies Symphony Hall on Thursday, May 18, when the San Francisco Symphony tackled the piece for the first time innearly a decade. Some of it, though, struggled to emerge from under the stiff and weighty musical approach of guest conductor Philippe Jordan.

This is the recurrent danger of the “War Requiem,” which calls for two large instrumental ensembles (the main orchestra and a chamber ensemble set off within it) as well as a chorus, a children’s choir and three virtuosic vocal soloists.

It’s a deliberately monumental creation, in some ways the most epic and ambitious work of Britten’s career. Like the stone cathedral it celebrates, the score is erected out of massive, somewhat blocky elements.

Yet for all its imposing heft, a performance of the “War Requiem” can be a tender and radiantly humane experience. It rages against the folly of war and murmurs spiritual words of consolation. It uses the musical traditions of the past — particularly the famous Requiem settings of Mozart and Verdi — to come to grips with the unique horrors of the 20th century.

The piece’s construction is both straightforward and subtly ingenious. The framework is the traditional text of the Requiem Mass for the dead, the same Latin liturgy that has been a central resource of European music for centuries.

Within that, Britten weaves settings of poems by the English World War I poet Wilfred Owen, who was killed in action at 25 just a week before the war’s end. Owen’s verse — plangent, ironic, tender and outraged — makes a perfect counterpart for the more impersonal strains of the Requiem. The liturgy blesses all who have died; the poetry brings us close to the individual men who perished in the trenches of France.

To make that poignant tug-of-war felt, though, requires a more sensitive and detailed interpretive palette than Jordan could muster. The Swiss conductor, who currently serves as music director of the Vienna State Opera, has not led the San Francisco Symphony since his2007 debut. Just as on that occasion, his conducting was firm and unyielding, favoring muscle over nuance.

At times, that inclination paid handsome results. The “Dies Irae” movement in particular, in which Britten lobs orchestral and choral fireballs to evoke the final Day of Wrath, exploded with full fury, and the Symphony Chorus, led by guest director Joshua Habermann, rose handsomely to the occasion.

In Owen’s haunting “Parable of the Old Man and the Young,” which transmutes the biblical tale of the sacrifice of Isaac into an indictment of Europe’s wartime leadership, tenor Ian Bostridge and baritone Brian Mulligan joined forces for a perfectly modulated account.

The closing minutes of the performance, with the orchestra jangling like cathedral bells and the members of the Ragazzi Boys Chorus under Kent Jue lofting seraphic prayers from the rear balcony, cast a spell, leading into a long, final moment of silence.

Elsewhere, though, Jordan’s reading felt hamstrung and constrained. The gentler and more luminous liturgical sections tended to land with a thud; Britten’s setting of “The Next War” (“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to Death”), with its jaunty bravado, plodded.

Mulligan, a late substitution for British baritone Iain Paterson, stood out among the soloists for the sense of subdued torment he brought to his singing (this is an artist who counts Stephen Sondheim’sSweeney Toddand John Adams’Richard Nixonamong his signature roles). Bostridge’s contributions were a blend of tonal robustness andweird stage mannerisms; from the main balcony with the Chorus, soprano Jennifer Holloway unleashed lightning bolts of vocalism.

One of the great and terrible aspects of the “War Requiem” is its unseemly, tragic timeliness. Britten combined the memories of two world wars, flattening them together into a single catastrophe against a centuries-long backdrop of grief and pain. Looking around in 2023, one can only wonder when this music will at last cease to be relevant.

Reach Joshua Kosman:jkosman@sfchronicle.com; Twitter:@JoshuaKosman