Receive free Music updates
We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Music news every morning.
This is a performance that was never meant to happen. If Arts Council England’s shock edict last autumn had been put fully into effect, English National Opera would have had to abandon its 2023-24 season and turn to scrabbling around for some kind of future outside London.
Instead, successive climbdowns by the Arts Council have guaranteed performances at the London Coliseum at least through to the end of March. A lack of major new productions must be a worry, especially at the box office, but the mix of revivals, a semi-staged concert performance and one novelty has been well judged.
Having cheated death at the eleventh hour, ENO is opening its new season with Britten’s Peter Grimes. This is the opera that gave the company its finest hour, when Sadler’s Wells Opera, as it was then named, presented the opera’s triumphant premiere towards the end of the war in 1945.
It is very doubtful that David Alden’s 2009 production would have pleased Britten, but it has strengths alongside its irritations. Peter Grimes is still an outcast, the victim of a witch hunt by the people of the Borough, but Alden tells us there is no such thing as “normal” in society, at least not in this one, where almost everybody seems to be hiding some foible, sexual or otherwise. Expressionism hangs potently in the air, but the lurid caricatures of the Borough’s residents are wildly overdone.
© Bill Knight
Fortunately, the three central characters are played straight. The title role is taken by Gwyn Hughes Jones, who has the strength and sensitivity of voice to embrace the role’s vocal extremes and has come on as a stage performer. His Peter Grimes is always believable, a moving portrait of a deeply troubled man.
Alongside him, Elizabeth Llewellyn plays and sings a warmly sympathetic Ellen Orford (though why does the production have her carrying on with her knitting as the boy apprentice reveals his abuse?), and Simon Bailey is a most impressive Captain Balstrode.
Among the others, David Soar and Alex Otterburn sing strongly as Hobson and Ned Keene, and Clive Bayley is authoritative as the lawyer Swallow. John Findon delivers a fearsome rallying cry for persecution in the role of Bob Boles, but Christine Rice’s quality mezzo is on the high side for the riper lines of Auntie, the local publican.
ENO’s music director, Martyn Brabbins, conducts with a sharp ear for Britten’s sounds of the sea and the piercing cries of the seabirds, though even more drive would be good. The ENO chorus is on strong form. Back in 1945, Peter Grimes signalled new life after years of darkness. Let us hope it does so again.
★★★★☆
‘Peter Grimes’ to October 11, eno.org
Denial of responsibility! Vigour Times is an automatic aggregator of Global media. In each content, the hyperlink to the primary source is specified. All trademarks belong to their rightful owners, and all materials to their authors. For any complaint, please reach us at – [email protected]. We will take necessary action within 24 hours.
