Conductor
Antonio Pappano
Director
Willy Decker
Designs
John Macfarlane
Lighting
Max Keller
Peter Grimes
Ben Heppner
Captain Balstrode
Alan Opie
Ellen Orford
Janice Watson
Hobson
Jonathan Veira
Swallow
Matthew Best
Ned Keene
Quentin Hayes
The Rector
Brian Galliford
Bob Boles
Ian Caley
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Peter Grimes
by Benjamin Britten
Royal Opera
Covent Garden
3 - 16 July 2004
This is an outstanding performance of Benjamin Britten's most powerful opera.
The moral and emotional torment of this work is unrelenting: the fisherman Peter Grimes treats the young apprentices in his charge without the slightest concern for their welfare. One dies before the action begins, a second near the end. For this reviewer, Grimes is a brute with barely a redeeming feature, not even that of the immoralist courageously challenging the deadening norms of his society. Yet we are somehow invited by the music and the tenor of the libretto to sympathise with this cruel bully, to be touched by the naïve woman, Ellen Orford, who loves him and helps him acquire his doomed new apprentice, and to look down upon the elderly widow Mrs Sedley simply because she is staid and prissy, though she is the one who really sees through Grimes and his deadly indifference to his young charges.
Britten's score sets this well-trodden scenario the outcast defying the stifling, if humane, values of tradition to glorious music. Yet it is not easy music to bring to life. Under a lesser conductor than Antonio Pappano, it could all be awfully routine and stilted. Pappano and the orchestra that he has succeeded in making more virtuosic, balanced and clearly articulated each time one hears it sustain the dramatic narrative with uninterrupted power and finesse. Ben Heppner is a superb Grimes, not heroic in the Tristan mould, but a very basic human being motivated by the crudest egotism and materialism, rather than by elemental passion or the desire to re-make the world. Janice Watson, who sings Ellen Orford, has a voice of great purity, even if it sometimes has a bit of a wobble, and she beautifully conveys the naive and ultimately weak love that somehow fails to move Grimes. Alan Opie performs Balstrode full of passion and engagement with the unfolding tragedy, unlike some of the other parts, such as Brian Galliford's Rector or Anne Collins's Auntie, which are well sung but lack dramatic colour.
The production, taken from La Monnaie in Brussels, is imaginative and potent. No Suffolk sea-shores or rolling waves here, but a series of abstract and spare sets, with stark backgrounds and lighting. In this space the choir is moulded, as if by some invisible hand, into immaculately formed gestures befitting the words they sing.
Simon May
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