Britten, Peter Grimes - Opera North at Sadler's Wells:  soloists, chorus and orchestra of Opera North conducted by Richard Farnes, Phyllida Lloyd (director)  Anthony Ward (set and costume designer) 23.11. 2006 (JPr)

 

This new staging by Phyllida Lloyd was reviewed recently when it visited Manchester (Review here.)Meanwhile just a reminder of what a ‘homecoming’ this was, as Opera North fresh from their refurbishment of their base at the Grand Theatre in Leeds bring Peter Grimes to the site of its première over 60 years ago on 7 June 1945. John Lucas’s book Reggie, about the conductor Reginald Goodall who conducted that first performance, recalls:

 

‘The first night … took place amid great nervousness from everyone, including Guthrie [administrator of the opera company at Sadler’s Wells]. “Whatever happens,” he said to Joan Cross [the first Ellen Orford]), shortly before curtain up, “we were absolutely right to do this piece.” Guthrie worried that the theatre’s central chandelier, back in place for the first time since the air-raids, might come crashing down on the heads of the musical world assembled in the stalls below – Ralph Vaughan Williams, Sir George Dyson, William Walton, Michael Tippett, John Christie of Glyndebourne, Yehudi Menuhin (in Britain to give concerts for American forces), Albert Coates. The house was sold out, “with more evening clothes and fur wraps than have been seen in the theatre since the war began”. … Britten (“a young man with disordered hair”, reported the News Chronicle the next day) paced up and down at the back off the stalls during the performance. He was too nervous to sit down.’

 

There was no risk of any chandelier falling on this occasion, as that disappeared in Sadler’s Wells own renovation at the end of last century, but there were some of the ‘great and good’ in attendance, even if there were almost as many evening suits as t-shirts and jeans and certainly no fur that I could see!

 

The Borough was the name of George Crabbe’s 1810 poem which inspired this opera by Britten and his librettist, Montagu Slater. My only qualm is whether this albeit very powerfully dark evocation of the outsider (Grimes) hounded to death by the seaside community (‘Borough’) which reeks of hypocritical self-righteousness deserved the title ‘staging’. It is in truth no more than an elaborate semi-staging by Phyllida Lloyd abetted by Anthony Ward’s minimalist designs and eclectic mix of fairly modern ‘off the charity-shop rail’ costumes. Against a painted screen of a grey sea and with little more than a few wooden palettes, a large net suspended like a circus tent, a large cross, some chains and a tower everything is hinted at from the sea, to the pub, church and Peter Grimes’s hut.

 

This does not rate highly in the list of my favourite operas, mainly because I am not certain that it is not implied that Grimes is indeed guilty of the death of his apprentices. Also, while Richard Wagner is never left alone by the academics because in their view a composer must always include his private thoughts in his works, here we are supposed to suspend belief that not everything associated from the lives of Britten or his life-partner, Peter Pears (the first Grimes), ever gets into this opera. Of course it is easy to say yes, they are there as ‘outsiders’ in a world were homosexuality was illegal, there is the intrusion by community of others into their private lives when theirs are probably no better themselves, but I may be naïve but I have always had problems with the young children and the abuse they suffer in this opera.

 

Phyllida Lloyd washes this all out to sea by making Grimes seemingly innocent of all the deaths and putting the boy’s ‘cliff fall’ we witness firmly as the result of the community pounding on Grimes’s door. Just before this Lloyd is content to make the artifice of the stage only too apparent and is disinclined to let (as during the other ‘sea intervals’) the music talk for itself. The Passacaglia is spoilt by the erection of that tower supposedly representing Grimes’s cliff top hut and it is only too clear that a safety wire is clipped onto the belt of his apprentice (Aaron Eastwood) before he flies to his ‘death’. Whatever happened to the magic of the theatre?

Who is Peter Grimes? would involve another long dissertation. Peter Pears (who I met late in his life) would never be the brute with psychological problems as characterised here, this owed more to Jon Vickers’s famous portrayal that I saw at Covent Garden twenty-five years ago. The tortured fisherman is written to somehow have the nature of a poet and visionary amongst his violent outbursts, just think of when he sings 'Now the Great Bear and Pleiades'. However it was at this moment that I remembered the great ‘lost’ Grimes of Alberto Remedios who was forever covering Vickers who was never sick and only gave a few performances of this role in South America and in concert, including this scene during an English National Opera gala. Not the greatest actor (but fully capable of both anger and poetry) he however had the complete voice to cover Grimes’s extreme range. Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s voice is an essentially light tenor, though possibly with a Heldentenor future, but he tended to croon the top of his voice and (to my ears) lose pitch when singing unaccompanied. He is a great bear of a man on his own; he very clearly showed a mind at disarray and not at one with the world around him. During the last ‘sea interval’ ('Moonlight') his distraught Grimes held the dead boy up, with a sigh that could only leave the most hard-hearted in the audience unaffected.

Lloyd-Roberts’s performance is showcased by a superb ensemble (I deliberately avoid writing ‘of singers’ for reasons that will become apparent) lead by Christopher Purves's sympathetic Balstrode, far from the salty old sea-dog of yore. Giselle Allen's is an equally more youthful than usual and a very tender Ellen Orford. However, she reminded me of a young Josephine Barstow and shared with that esteemed singer an inability to get the words over clearly. There really did seem to be the hope of something good happening between her character and Grimes until the terrible moment when he hits her in the stomach, a moment so unexpected that it made me gasp out loud.

Amongst his peers unfit to judge him, Richard Angas's dirty old man of lawyer, Swallow, stood out, unfortunately his voice like that of Alan Oke (Bob Boles) and Nigel Robson (Horace Adams, the rector) has seen better days, so although their acting was exemplary their singing was not. Good on both counts was Roderick Williams’s superbly sleazy Keene, here to peddle drugs.

The women’s roles were more consistently sung and acted, with Amy Freston and Claire Booth, tartily and enthusiastically enduring Swallow’s gropings, Yvonne Howard's Auntie, the suitably fearsome landlady, and Ethna Robinson the prying, snooping addict Mrs Sedley. Leading up to those terrifying chants of ‘Peter Grimes’ by a rampant lynch-mob made up of the sanctimonious and God-fearing Borough community there is a chilling sequence where they destroy him as an effigy in a sequence that confirmed to me that Robin Hardy’s 1973 film ‘The Wicker Man’ may have had an influence on this staging in more ways than one.

I have had no experience of Opera North's chorus recently, but have heard many of course, and undoubtedly if they have ever sung better then that it must have been a good performance to be at. Richard Farnes's polished and eloquent conducting shows what an inspirational choice he has been as music director of this excellent and enterprising company. I have not seen a performance by Opera North for several years and was delighted to find them in such great shape as evidenced by the high standard of this well-thought through staging by Phyllida Lloyd, the overall quality of the singing and the fine orchestral playing.

 

Jim Pritchard

 

 

 Picture © Bill Cooper