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Peter Grimes
TEN OUT OF TEN: The Guardian Review of Reviews
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS: The Guardian
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS: The FT
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS: The Independent
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS: MusicOMH.com
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS: Whatsonstage.com
Photo by George Mott
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Composer |
Britten, Benjamin |
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Librettist |
Montagu Slater after Crabbe's poem The Borough |
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Venue and Dates |
English National Opera 9, 11, 14, 16, 18, 21, 23, 28, 30 May 2009 |
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Conductor |
Edward Gardner |
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Production |
Director: David Alden Sets: Paul Steinberg Costumes: Brigitte Reiffenstuel Lighting: Adam Silverman Movement Director: Maxine Braham |
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Performers |
Ellen Orford: Amanda Roocroft Peter Grimes: Stuart Skelton / John Daszak (28, 30 May) Balstrode: Gerald Finley Auntie: Rebecca de Pont Davies Mrs Sedley : Felicity Palmer First Niece: Gillian Ramm Second Niece: Mairéad Buicke Ned Keene: Leigh Melrose Bob Boles: Michael Colvin Swallow: Matthew Best Revd Horace Adams: Stuart Kale Reverend Horace: Adams Stuart Kale John (Grimes’ apprentice): Benny Gurr Doctor Crabbe: Stefano Gressieux |
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Notes |
Gerry’s first Balstrode New production Co-production with De Vlaamse Opera and Opera de Oviedo |
Click photo to read our interview where Gerry talks about, among other things, this production of Peter Grimes
Click here to read an interview for MusicOMH where Gerry talks about Peter Grimes
Click below to download a podcast from The Independent
Edward Seckerson talks to Singer Stuart Skelton, Director David Alden and Conductor Edward Gardner about ENO's new production of Britten's Peter Grimes
Click link to read an article from Reuters: Mob rule revived in Britten masterpiece
Michael Roddy, Reuters, 6 May 2009
http://uk.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUKTRE5450VP20090506
What the critics say
Keith McDonnell, MusicOMH, 10 May 2009
http://www.musicomh.com/opera/eno-grimes_0509.htm
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
David Alden has directed many outstanding productions for ENO over the years but this coruscating version of Peter Grimes must count as his very best.
Not only did the elemental force of the opera come across more intensely than I've ever experienced in the theatre before, but his production also confirmed that Peter Grimes is the greatest of all 20th century operas.
It's hard to know where to start. Very few first nights have been so eagerly anticipated, and I certainly can't recall as wholehearted endorsement of a new production on the part of an audience as this - the huge ovations accorded chorus, cast, conductor and production team at the close said it all. It was an evening of music-theatre on such an exalted level that it will go down in history as not only one of ENO's greatest evenings but proof, if proof were needed, that Peter Grimes is a work of such visceral force that when dislodged from its 'quaint' historical trappings its ability to shock, and make an audience feel uncomfortable doesn't diminish, it increases.
There are many ways to interpret Peter Grimes but Alden has taken a probing, even disquieting view of the opera, as anyone familiar with his trailblazing work would expect. He sets the piece roughly around the time of composition, there's a brilliant whiff of de-mob to Brigitte Reiffenstuel's wonderfully detailed costumes, but the message he delivers – that a tight-knitted community will not accommodate a 'loner' is timeless.
He portrays Grimes as an innocent, visionary outsider whose inability to comprehend his isolation from the community is both poignant and deeply moving. Everyone points the finger of blame at him even, or maybe especially, Ellen Orford. Alden's take on this character is probably his most revisionist, as from the start she is portrayed as a carefree young woman who doesn't really want to be involved with Grimes but can't see a way out of it.
When she spots the bruise on Grimes' new apprentice she has her 'get out clause' and her mind is made up – Grimes is abusing his new apprentice and that is that. Alden is implying that Ellen is very much the villain here and her act of betrayal is truly shocking. His direction of the chorus is both terrifying and faultless. The opera begins with them huddled at the back of the stage as one mass of shouting, angry townsfolk and as their anger against Grimes increases they invade the stage. This is mob rule at its most repulsive and in the third act manhunt their deranged thirst for blood is almost too frightening to watch. It's here that some wave tiny Union Flags, and we all know where such misplaced patriotism can lead.
Within Paul Steinberg's expressionistic and abstract set designs Alden is able to create a sense of heightened paranoia in each scene, and the whole opera is brilliantly lit by Adam Silverman. Of course all this would be academic without a top-flight cast of singing-actors, but fortunately ENO has assembled one of the strongest casts imaginable and all of the principals acquitted themselves admirably. Rebecca de Pont Davies' Auntie was no big brassy landlady but was portrayed as pin-striped suit wearing Rita Sackville-West character with club foot and cane, and neatly trimmed hair.
Leigh Melrose turned Ned Keene into a proper oily spiv whilst Felicity Palmer's creepy Mrs Sedley was a lesson in drug-fuelled psychosis. Gerald Finley's Balstrode not only sang with his customary exemplary diction but was one of the very few 'sane' characters on stage whilst Amanda Roocroft, one or two blemishes apart, added to her long list of slightly-unhinged female characters with a steely, unsympathetic yet thrillingly full-voiced portrayal as Ellen Orford.
Stuart Skelton in the title role was nothing sort of sensational. Not only was his acting minutely observed but he sang this daunting role with apparent ease. He had the vocal heft to rattle the rafters in the explosive declamatory episodes and the ability to hone his voice down to barely a whisper for the more introspective moments. His mad scene was almost too painful to watch – a stunning performance.
The augmented chorus was exemplary but the hero of the hour was music director Edward Garnder. His reading was taught, visceral and explosive where required and I have rarely heard this score sound so 'European' as opposed to 'English'. The playing of the orchestra was beyond praise – I don't think I've ever heard them play better.
There are only eight more performances of Alden's deeply unsettling production, and no one who believes in the life-enhancing properties that opera can deliver can afford to miss it.
Photo by Tristram Kenton
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 11 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/11/opera-review-peter-grimes-coliseum
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears returned to England from the US in 1942 with plans for Peter Grimes, to be based on George Crabbe's poem The Borough, already fermenting. They knew it would not be an easy homecoming, and it's the hypocritical world of provincial Britain during the second world war that is so disturbingly evoked in David Alden's outstanding new production of Grimes for English National Opera.
Alden's view is pitiless, unsparing, and presented with immaculate stagecraft. The townspeople of the Borough are a totally dysfunctional community, fuelled by religious bigotry, who have singled out Grimes as their scapegoat. This staging never condemns Grimes; the death of the apprentice is accidental, caused when Grimes is distracted by the sound of the town lynch mob baying for his blood. Instead, Stuart Skelton presents Grimes as frustrated and naively aspirational, while everyone around him seems damaged in some way, either physically or emotionally: Ellen Orford (Amanda Roocroft) has lost a husband, Balstrode (Gerald Finley) has only one arm, while Auntie's two nieces (Gillian Ramm and Mairéad Buicke) seem to be autistic twins, utterly inseparable and giving an even more creepy twist to the services they may or may not provide to the clientele of the local pub.
On to this thoroughly curdled portrayal of English provincial life, Alden adds another layer, that of German expressionism, pulling the emotional knots even tighter. The 1940s naturalism of Paul Steinberg's sets and Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes are mixed with the sharp angles and skewed perspectives of Vienna 30 years earlier. Rebecca de Pont Davies's Auntie, the butch, besuited landlady of the Boar, seems to have walked straight out of an Otto Dix painting, while the dance with which the third act opens is a surreal affair, coming close to the tavern scene in Berg's Wozzeck.
That expressionist edge carries over into the music, too. Edward Gardner brings out the Bergian echoes in Britten's score with passionate intensity; the choral climaxes have terrifying force, and every solo performance, led by Roocroft and Finley, is etched with the finest dramatic precision. This superb company achievement has Stuart Skelton's towering performance at its heart, perfectly combining human frailties with an edge of brutality and moments of touching poetic insight – probably the most complete Grimes in London since Jon Vickers at Covent Garden in the late 1970s. It is the finest possible tribute to Skelton that he should invite such comparisons in what is a very special ENO show indeed.
Photo by George Mott
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 10 May 2009
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/dda82e60-3d6e-11de-a85e-00144feabdc0.html
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
There is something reassuringly obvious about the greatest operas – and something unknowable. Barely have we lapsed into a state of cosy familiarity with them than – smack! – our preconceptions are swept away by a performance that dares to say something new, striking up voices, colours and perspectives that had never crossed the spectrum of our experience.
English National Opera’s new production of Peter Grimes, unveiled on Saturday, falls into this category. Britten’s portrait of the irrationalities and contradictions of the human psyche has been part of this company’s tradition since the first performance at Sadler’s Wells in 1945. But the very Englishness of the piece has tended to inhibit English interpreters. Now comes an interpretation from the American director, David Alden, that is intensely theatrical, deeply musical and, at the same time, completely at odds with the work’s performance tradition.
As we might expect from Alden, who has a history of provocative work at ENO, his Grimes is not a literal portrait of Suffolk community life: Paul Steinberg’s sets offer no fishing paraphernalia and the sea is implied rather than seen. Nor is it a timeless vision of man, mob and universe: Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes are very 1940s, and the pub scene features a typically English fancy dress competition. No, the Grimes we see here is a nightmare – and, like all nightmares, the participants are instantly recognisable while behaving in a way that is frightening and threatening.
Alden argues in a programme note that Britten’s masterpiece is even more autobiographical than we had supposed: he describes it as the “paranoid fantasy” of a gay conscientious objector coming back to his homeland with his lover and wondering what was going to happen.
That is debatable, and not everyone will approve of Alden’s uninhibited assault on one of English opera’s sacred cows. But no one can fault the technical finesse with which he translates his idea to the stage or the expressionistic verve with which it comes to life. His protagonist is the chorus, choreographed alternately as a shoal of fish, feverishly swirling and huddling, and as an impenetrable wall against which the principals are defined.
The characterisations are deliberately exaggerated – the Nieces behave like synchronised dolls, Auntie is a fur-coated dyke who ends up wearing the head of a boar (the name of her pub) – and the exaggerations are intensified by Adam Silverman’s nightmarish lighting. But the narrative is never less than clear and truthful, and Alden leaves us to make up our minds as to whether Grimes is sadist, misfit or tragic visionary.
Stuart Skelton plays him as a barefooted bear of a man who abuses Ellen in much the same way as he does his apprentice. The nature of the production means Skelton has little chance to dominate but the lusty sensuousness of his voice means his Grimes is always more human than caricature. The same cannot be said for Amanda Roocroft’s Ellen and Gerald Finley’s Balstrode, in spite of their committed singing and faithful realisation of Alden’s concept.
None of this would have made much impact without the exceptionally refined, intensely revealing contribution from Edward Gardner and his orchestra. Gardner gets better and better: here he picks up all the shrill screams that go with the score’s Bergian avant-gardisms, as well as its violent beauty and aching heart. The performance unfolds at fever pitch – a fabulous marriage of sight and sound, with stage and pit constantly striking sparks off each other in ways that illuminate and provoke
Photo by George Mott
Richard Morrison, The Times, 11 May 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article6261113.ece
FOUR OUT OF FIVE STARS
David Alden’s new production creates a creepy world in which Grimes and Ellen are the only sane ones surrounded by freaks People once paid to watch freaks in circuses. But in David Alden’s compellingly creepy new Peter Grimes for English National Opera, the freaks spill out from every corner of Benjamin Britten’s masterpiece.
Mrs Sedley (Felicity Palmer, brilliantly grotesque) is a drug-addled, scandal-mongering Miss Marple lookalike. The pub landlady, Auntie, is translated by Rebecca de Pont Davies into a club-footed, cackling dominatrix in a man’s suit. Her two nieces are retarded twins, forever wincing or beating their own dolls. The apothecary Ned Keene is turned by the characterful Leigh Melrose into a pervy spiv. And in Gerald Finley’s hands even the “dependable” Captain Balstrode is an hallucinating, one-armed loon. You get the picture. Everyone — including the terrifying, full-throated chorus with their cult-like dances, full of ritualistic stabbing gestures — is on vacation from The Wicker Man, all either deformed, defective, diseased or depraved.
Except, that is, for Stuart Skelton’s hulking but dignified Grimes and Amanda Roocroft’s loyal, humiliated Ellen. Grimes is certainly the odd man out, but here it’s because he and Ellen are the only characters not palpably perverted or mad. Grimes’s intervention in Old Joe Has Gone Fishing, far from destabilising a jolly singalong, is played as an oasis of stillness and sanity in a sinister communal rally.
But the real strength of Alden’s production (well served by Paul Steinberg’s claustrophobic corrugated sets and Turneresque skyscapes) is that it shows Grimes gradually being destroyed by the pressure of being the only man with proper human feelings in this gallery of freaks. He starts behaving exactly as his persecutors accuse him of doing. Nothing demonstrates that more effectively than Alden’s chilling staging of the apprentice’s death — as the indirect result of the villagers’ manhunt.
There’s one other typical Alden provocation. At the orgiastic climax of their most malice-filled chorus, the mob suddenly wave Union Jacks. The implication (reinforced by 1940s costumes) is that this chronically insular, hypocritical, prejudiced and lunatic community is Britain itself.
Where the production doesn’t quite add up is in making us believe that Skelton’s nobly-sung Grimes is sufficiently violent to strike Ellen or the boy apprentice. And the emphasis on Ellen’s anguish (she’s centre-stage at the end) also skews the drama, though Roocroft, not quite in best voice, does turn on the histrionics impressively. No complaints, however, about the music. Edward Gardner gets wonderfully detailed playing from the ENO orchestra, and keeps ensembles razor-sharp.
Photo by Clive Barda
Colin Anderson, theoperacritic, 9 May 2009
http://theoperacritic.com/tocreviews2.php?review=ca/2009/enogrimes0509.htm
Stuart Skelton triumphs as Grimes in ENO's dramatic new production
This is a great evening at the opera. It was an inspired first night, too, one that suggests this current run should be a huge success and that David Alden's new production will become a fixture in English National Opera's repertoire.
As ever, one can have doubts about the staging but there is more to admire and praise than to carp out. The first coup is the dramatic beginning - Peter Grimes bursts onto the stage to abruptly cease the audience's hubbub; there is then some chatter from the community that fills the coroner's room before Edward Gardner cues the orchestra. The use of tables, fisherman Grimes atop of them, suggests already his isolation from the rest of the villagers. The inquest is to determine how Grimes's apprentice died at sea.
There's not much sympathy for Grimes. This only comes from Ellen Orford and, to a certain extent, Captain Balstrode. Otherwise Grimes is rejected, reviled, he will be hunted down and, eventually, at Balstrode's behest, take his boat out to sea and sink it. Yes, Grimes strikes Ellen and a second apprentice dies (as seen here, this is caused by Grimes being distracted by the baying mob).
Of course, the story is well known, the opera an enduring success since its premiere at Sadler's Wells Opera (the precursor of ENO) in 1945. Peter Grimes has been audio-recorded several times (conducted by the composer, Colin Davis, twice, Richard Hickox and Bernard Haitink). I would urge Chandos, for all that it has the Hickox version in its catalogue but has recently added Edward Gardner to its roster of artists, to consider issuing BBC Radio 3's recording on CD (the performance of 21 May is being captured for broadcast on 11 July) for musically this is all very distinguished.
Many things stand out. One is the immaculate diction of chorus and soloists (with surtitles, too, every word should make itself audible) which makes Montagu Slater's libretto more telling than it can be (inspired of course by George Crabbe's poem The Borough). Then there is the vivid characterisations of the roles in terms of Alden's direction, sometimes overdone it must be said, but each person is distinctive - not least the compassion of Ellen Orford, finely revealed by Amanda Roocroft, and Gerald Finley conjures a Balstrode tellingly at one remove from the crowd.
As for Stuart Skelton's Grimes, he is his own man vocally (leaning towards Vickers but tempered by Langridge, and without mimicking either). This is a Grimes whom one feels less pity for, Skelton alive to Grimes's erratic nature, his bluff determination, his despair and his regret; his looming madness is also very well caught (reminding of Tristan's hysteria). Skelton's realisation of 'Now the Great Bear and Pleiades' (Act I) is especially haunting.
The opening of Act II is particularly evocative as staged here, a blissful Sunday Morning, which makes Grimes's striking of Ellen all the more shocking; so too the drum-led lynch-mob that goes in search of Grimes. The front room-like pub of Auntie is less convincing, so too the sparseness of Grimes's hut which seems rather too orderly; the dance that takes place in Act III is rather unconvincing in its robotic movements; and other gestures are, to use the phrase, sexed-up. But it matters not because the staging is generally compelling and tells the story well, with good sets, costumes and lighting.
As well as the successes for Skelton, Roocroft and Finley, the other members of the cast are also stellar and include Rebecca de Pont Davies (Auntie), Felicity Palmer (Mrs Sedley) and Matthew Best (Swallow). It's also a triumph for Edward Gardner who conducts a deeply considered, very well prepared, intense and dramatically concentrated performance, the ENO Orchestra in superb form and finding details afresh in Britten's evocative scoring (the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia bind the whole: from subtle if eerie atmosphere to tempestuous power, this is a comprehensive revealing of Britten's orchestral prowess.
There are nine performances in all, the last two (on May 28 & 30) featuring John Daszak as Grimes. Whether Daszak or Skelton: don't miss!
Photo by Clive Barda
George Hall Monday 11 May 2009
http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/24344/peter-grimes
Britten’s first masterpiece returns to the Coliseum in a new production by David Alden. There is greatness in the evening, much of it stemming from the pit, where Edward Gardner presides over a vividly intense account of the score, drawing the finest playing from ENO’s orchestra and wonderful work from the expanded chorus.
Alden’s staging is less sure-footed. In Paul Steinberg’s sets and Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes the period is presumably around the time of the opera’s creation - it was premiered by ENO’s parent company at Sadler’s Wells in 1945 - though the visuals lack a strong sense of an English fishing village. The outside scenes are undistinguished and even the local pub looks more like the drawing room of some louche local Bohemian, with Rebecca de Pont Davies’ landlady Auntie a hand me down version of Vita Sackville-West.
Though the score has its expressionist moments - brilliantly articulated by Gardner - the drama’s mode is realistic and communal hand gestures look wildly out of place, as do the mysterious twin schoolgirl Nieces, who seem to have wandered in from The Shining.
But there’s impressive vocal security from Stuart Skelton’s Grimes, even if the dramatic side of his creation is still a rough sketch. Gerald Finley provides a firm and incisive Balstrode, though his naval uniform indicates someone on active service rather than a retired sea-captain. Best of the principals is Amanda Roocroft, once again searching out the centre of her character’s predicament in a superbly sung and movingly acted realisation of Ellen Orford.
Photo by Clive Barda
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph 11 May 2009
Rarely in my career as a critic have I felt as ambivalent as I do about David Alden's staging of Britten's first operatic masterpiece. It undoubtedly packs a ferocious punch and keeps the audience breathlessly excited throughout. Yet – even more than in recent productions by Willy Decker and Phyllida Lloyd, which took a similar approach – it seems to me deeply wrong-headed and untrue to the composer's vision.
Alden locates the opera in the 1940s, presumably to suggest the period of its composition. Paul Steinberg's set presents a large hut made of corrugated iron and breeze blocks, the walls of which open to a cloudy skyscape. There's little sense of a fishing community at the sea's mercy, and even less sense of the quirky small-town Ealing Comedy Englishness which the score and libretto paint both sharply and even affectionately.
Instead, the humanity and subtlety are drained away, leaving a parade of grotesques out of German Expressionism. Captain Balstrode is a onearmed robotic dummy. The decent if venal apothecary Ned Keene passes for a psychotic East End spiv who seems to have muddled Mrs Sedley's laudanum with amphetamines. The coroner Swallow is a drunk whose trousers fall round his ankles, while the bluff, coarse publican Auntie has become a Weimar Republic lesbian decadent, with pigtailed zombie mädchen in school uniform for her nieces. Is this Aldeburgh?
Only Ellen Orford, Peter Grimes and his apprentice are spared the transformation into caricature, but ironically this has the effect of making their emotions, dilemmas and personalities seem pallid and two-dimensional.
The fundamental question that the opera so powerfully explores – how compassionate can society afford to be when dealing with a dangerous man such as Grimes? – is evaded in a black-and-white scenario which lets the violent abuse of children off the hook.
But how viscerally exciting the production is, and how enthrallingly it is executed. Edward Gardner conducts a sumptuous, impassioned reading of the score, and it's years since I've heard ENO's orchestra play with such richness of tone or fire in its belly. The cast has been meticulously rehearsed, and there's not a flat performance to be seen or heard.
The burly Australian tenor Stuart Skelton sings Grimes with tremendous sinew and sureness, and Amanda Roocroft is all sighs and tears as Ellen.
Gerald Finley (Balstrode) and Matthew Best (Swallow) are on top vocal form. Leigh Melrose and Felicity Palmer etch arresting portraits of Ned Keene and Mrs Sedley, while Rebecca de Pont Davies almost steals the show with her electrifyingly sinister Auntie. The chorus is stunning. In fact, it's all stunning – I just don't think it's what Britten meant.
Photo by George Mott
Edward Seckerson, the Independent, 11 May 2009
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
There is always added pressure on English National Opera to deliver with Peter Grimes.
As Sadler’s Wells Opera they brought it into the world back in June 1945 and the world was duly startled. But if ever an occasion demonstrated how fiercely possessive of it they are, this was it. Director David Alden has even sought to underline ENO’s “ownership” alluding not just to the period of its premiere but to the ferociously jingoistic mood of the nation as the Second World War raged on. Its first audiences may have recognised themselves from the clothes (Brigitte Reiffenstuel) but would they, could they, have recognised the ugliness of their attitudes? This was no time to be different – and no one knew that better than Britten.
The Borough (a.ka. “The Nation”) is already gathered when we arrive in the auditorium and from the weathered, sea-rusted, surfaces of Paul Steinberg’s lowering set it is already clear that a picture-perfect representation of life on the Suffolk coast has no place here. Alden and Steinberg view Grimes through the poetry of Montagu Slater’s libretto. Their vision is dark and distorted and played out in brutal shadows and unforgiving white light. The Borough comprises a gallery of distinct individuals but Alden sees them all through expressionist eyes: Rebecca de Pont Davies’ publican “Auntie” is something out of Britten’s “queer” milieu – a pin-striped male impersonator with a silver-topped cane. Her simpering and suitably androgynous “nieces” (Gillian Ramm and Mairead Buicke) look ripe for “grooming”. Ned Keene (Leigh Melrose) is what they used to call a “fancy man” – a randy pimp and purveyor of laudanum to the demented Miss Marple-like Mrs. Sedley - the marvellous Felicity Palmer one step away from Bedlam. Even Gerald Finley’s Captain Balstrode has one arm – bitten off by a shark, perhaps, or one of the locals.
But the really scary thing about Alden’s production is the way in which these assorted grotesques morph into a single entity – a brutal, unstoppable, force moved about the stage like a shoal of carnivorous fish. The climactic manhunt is the alcohol-fuelled by-product of a party in which Alden lays on a hellish vision of degenerating middle-England. The Union Jacks come out, and so does the hatred of a united national front. And the ENO Chorus – nothing short of sensational throughout the evening – are now simply overwhelming.
So, too, is Stuart Skelton in the title role. If ever a singing actor combined the elemental force of a Jon Vickers with the crazed inwardness of Pears, it is he. Watching him is hard, so near and yet so far from the healing embrace of the one person who understands him: Ellen Orford, a glimmer of humanity in Amanda Roocroft’s moving portrayal.
So, a visceral, highly charged evening driven from the tiller with tremendous passion and perception by Edward Gardner drawing playing from the ENO Orchestra that opened our ears as well as our hearts and more than confirmed the company’s ownership of this great piece.
Photo by George Mott
Barry Millington, Evening Standard 11 May 2009
Four out of five stars
Peter Grimes is Great Britten's anti-hero
The idea that Peter Grimes might be a simple tale of Suffolk fisherfolk never really held water. In recent decades, the view that Britten, as a closeted homosexual, was expressing his own sense of social exclusion through the outcast Grimes has achieved something of a consensus.
David Alden, in his dark, challenging new production (designed by Paul Steinberg), offers an intriguing but compelling slant on that perception. While Grimes, Ellen Orford and the apprentice are treated conventionally, the Borough folk become a gallery of grotesques.
Ned Keene the apothecary is a pill-popping spiv. Auntie is a mannish Radclyffe Hall figure, limping ominously around with a cane — her pub is transformed into a Parisian salon — and her two “nieces” are abused schoolgirls who re-enact their trauma with dolls and bizarre choreography.
With Captain Balstrode as a one-armed seaman and Auntie virtually the mythical one-legged lesbian, it’s quite a collection. But Alden’s purpose is serious. He transfers any notion of deviancy from the beleaguered fisherman to the community, their sexual shenanigans reaching an anarchic climax when the Moot Hall merry-making descends into cabaret-style debauchery. Are their antics unfulfilled fantasies, or is this how Grimes sees them?
The audience may perhaps feel cheated of its cathartic rage against small-minded Borough bigotry (an easy target) but this mob’s accusatory cries of “Peter Grimes!”, roared from front stage, churn the stomach none the less.
These malcontents have developed a repertoire of crazy hand gestures evoking mechanised labour and robotic, dehumanised alienation. Truly a broken society.
Stuart Skelton’s Grimes, poetic and distrait, with outbursts of belligerence, is impressively delivered. Amanda Roocroft’s finely sung Ellen is equally sympathetic. Rebecca de Pont Davies prowls the stage creepily as Auntie. Does she sanction the abusive exploitation of the two “nieces” (the excellent Gillian Ramm and Mairead Buicke), by the way? If so, it is difficult to see her in a sympathetic light.
Gerald Finley as Captain Balstrode makes up in firmness and warmth of tone for what he lacks in limbs. Matthew Best’s superbly resonant Swallow, Leigh Melrose’s splendidly slimy Ned Keene and Darren Jeffery’s obdurate Hobson also shine.
Edward Gardner’s taut grip in the opening stages finally erupted in an electrifying storm, yet elsewhere his expressive shaping of phrases were a continual delight.
Photo by George Mott
Peter Grahame Woolf, Musical Pointers, 12 May 2009
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents09/BrittenPeterGrimesENO2009.html
Arriving for the press night round from the back of the Coliseum, we were met by the sonorous sound of the full throated augmented ENO chorus in rehearsal. It boded well! Less than half the members are to be seen in these approved photos, but they - and the orchestra - were the glory of this revival of Britten's imperishable masterpiece.
There is a problem for those (few) of us with vivid memories of the historic original production, just a month after the end of the War at the (then smaller, until 1996) Sadler's Wells Theatre. Are those memories a liability? In the 1945 we had no difficulty in generalising from the Suffolk coastal village as depicted to mass cruelties in the world; nowadays everything seems to have to be drastically updated to make the point: - - when dislodged from its 'quaint' historical trappings its ability to shock increases - - (MusicOMH). Paul Steinberg's settings are defiantly anti-realistic and, for us, were never helpful. Many of the characters are further "grotesqued" by Alden, especially at The Boar"; Gerald Finley (Balstrode) writes: "- - only Grimes has a clear view about what's going on - - everyone else is slightly grotesque, so from an audience point of view I think it will be a little confrontational." Against that, the clear depiction of the fatal fall down the cliff is unequivocally demonstrated to be an accident, provoked by the villagers baying for blood.
But Musical Pointers to the music !
That was sensational and there were times (including the Interludes played against closed curtains for once) when one was inclined to close ones' eyes. With Edward Gardner at the helm, the ENO Chorus and Orchestra reached heights of power and sharp ensemble hitherto unimaginable. Stuart Skelton assumed the title role with complete assurance, and in a manner which drove out thoughts of his predecessors.
We look forward to reviewing Skelton's alternate, John Daszak, and meanwhile on archive DVD refreshing memories of the 1960s team of Britten, Pears and Harper [Decca 074 3261] "not just a fascinating historical document - - also a well-staged and often emotionally scorching production of this great, great opera" (Sky Arts).
Photo by George Mott
Melanie Eskenazi, Classicalsource.com, 12 May 2009
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=7061
Benjamin Britten said that his aim in “Peter Grimes” was “to express my awareness of the perpetual struggle of men and women whose livelihood depends on the sea”. English National Opera’s new production is not especially concerned either with that struggle or the pervading influence of the Suffolk seascape, but it triumphs because of its expert casting, glorious singing and incandescent musical direction.
As far as the characterisation of the protagonist is concerned, the spirit of Peter Pears very much guides David Alden’s hand – Pears wrote that “Grimes is not a hero nor is he an operatic villain … He is very much of an ordinary weak person who … offends against the conventional code.” Stuart Skelton embraces that definition both in his singing and his person – at once vulnerable and determined, he sings with touching purity of tone during the lyrical episodes such as ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and with searing intensity during his outburst in the ‘Prologue’ and his ‘mad scene’ at the close.
Alden has said that Jon Vickers’s performance of the part was “the greatest thing one could ever see” – rightly so, no-one who saw Vickers’s Grimes can ever forget it. Nevertheless, Alden has still managed to elicit from Skelton a reading that respects the influence of his great predecessor yet also embraces touches of Philip Langridge and Anthony Rolfe Johnson. This is not to say it is a derivative performance – far from it, since I don’t think I’ve heard ‘In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home’ sung with such poignant fervour.
Ellen Orford is a part which Amanda Roocroft was born to sing, and her special warmth of tone which seems to say all we need to know about womanly tenderness, coupled with a steely determination, is finely used here. There were a few less than perfect notes, but this is an Ellen to treasure, very much in the Heather Harper mould. Her singing of ‘Embroidery in childhood’ was spellbinding.
Gerald Finley’s Balstrode, though still a work in progress, has most of what’s needed to become a signature part for him – he conveys all the character’s ambiguity in his bluff kindness and his sense of practicality; the storm scene in which he advises Grimes “Man – go and ask her / Without your booty / She’ll have you now” somehow managed to convey the sadness of Grimes’s situation in three lines. Norman Bailey could have no worthier successor.
Auntie was a far cry from the usual amply upholstered landlady, clucking away about her customers: Alden must have been inspired to create this louche individual by the presence of the superb singing-actress Rebecca de Pont Davies, who draws every eye to her, and she is costumed and made up as though Radclyffe Hall and Vita Sackville-West had got together to see which semi-masculine attire might be the most disturbing. It’s a concept that will need time to grow on me, but as always she sang superbly, abetted by her equally disquieting nieces who go from uniformed denizens of a rather jolly prep school to squeaking Lolitas.
Felicity Palmer seems to have cornered the market in barmy ‘femmes de nom’ and her portrayal of Mrs Sedley neatly follows on from her Marquise de Berkenfeld and her Kabanicha. Leigh Melrose reminds of the Weasel in Nicholas Hytner’s National Theatre production of “The Wind in the Willows” such was his finely honed spivvery. Matthew Best provided ringing tone as Swallow, Stuart Kale was a lovably credible Rector, and Darren Jeffery a mesmerising and convincing Hobson – his scene with the drum was brilliantly done. Michael Colvin created an unusually bleak Bob Boles.
Edward Gardner’s conducting was his finest hour: he coaxed wonderfully supple, lovingly phrased playing from the ENO Orchestra in the quieter passages, and amply tempestuous ones in the storm scenes. This was conducting and playing to match the singing, and in this case you can’t ask for better than that.
The production is replete with David Alden’s customarily expert personenregie, the scenes between Grimes and Ellen wonderfully naturalistic, and the huge chorus brilliantly managed to cut from mob-rule to shame. Adam Silverman’s lighting is highly atmospheric, often providing the sense of place that the sets lack, and Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes are elegantly conceived, from Ellen’s ‘tea dress’ to Mrs Sedley’s ratty old cardigan.
Paul Steinberg’s sets are sometimes angled towards cutting off much of the stage from those seated on the sides, and the ‘one board fits all’ concept doesn’t appeal – all that hard Formica-look reminds of the inexplicably bleak interiors of Jenůfa’s house. As for Grimes’s hut, its absolute nakedness made nonsense of the Rector’s telling comment “Here’s order. Here’s skill”. Yet the opening scene of Act Two is evocatively staged, Grimes’s detachment from reality achieved without posturing. Quite why we were sometimes asked to imagine some of the chorus as part of ‘Street Scene’ I don’t know.
Never mind – this momentous staging is overwhelmingly moving: it is dedicated to the choreographer Claire Glaskin, who died in a car accident at the end of the first week of rehearsals, and she could hardly have a finer memorial.
Photo by George Mott
Jim Pritchard Seen and Heard, 12 May 2009
http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2009/Jan-Jun09/grimes0905.html
Peter Grimes became part of the history of Sadler’s Wells Opera, the predecessor to English National Opera, when it was premièred on 7 June 1945, conducted by Reginald Goodall. Despite its dark subject matter it was the first of Britten’s operas to gain for him both a critical and a popular success. Britten and his partner, Peter Pears, had been in America escaping the war since 1939 and were in California when they read George Crabbe’s poem The Borough. As a native of Suffolk, like Crabbe, Britten strongly identified with the tragic story of Peter Grimes, an Aldeburgh fisherman. Britten and Pears returned as conscientious objectors to England in 1942. Not long after, Montagu Slater was asked to write the libretto and, with the input of Britten and Pears, Grimes, while retaining the dark side to his character, also becomes the victim of cruel fate and the society in which he lives. It was, as Britten later pointed out, ‘a subject very close to my heart – the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual.’ Is Grimes Britten himself railing against some perceived guilt at being homosexual and his suffering from the social mores of the time and the gossips? Probably yes. There is a suggestion that Britten was molested by a master at school and this adds a possible element of paedophilia to an already harrowing tale of child slavery and child abuse. Or is it more simply the tale of Britten as the outsider (Grimes) unaccepted in his own hometown (country?) – the composer leaves it to his audience to decide.
David Alden who directed this new ENO Peter Grimes sums up its meaning as ‘On some levels it’s less about the man Grimes than about the Borough’s relationship with a man who may or may not be a sociopath-sadist-paedophile; but they turn him into that, whether he is or not. He is the scapegoat without any real evidence … I’d be very interested in seeing a production of Peter Grimes where he is obviously a paedophile, a production that plays it really clearly, but I don’t want to do it that way. Ultimately I’d feel it was a betrayal of the real feel of the piece.’
So how does David Alden present Peter Grimes? Well we are in Aldeburgh about the time the opera was composed, perhaps at the end of WWII and everyone is demob happy. Certainly Grimes is someone who is misunderstood and clearly does not fit in the others is hunted and harried by the ‘mob’ until he loses his mind and sinks his boat out at sea. In fact the main set by Paul Steinberg is part fish market, part community hall with a sloping corrugated tin roof and benches. This converts with a few battered armchairs and a fireplace into ‘The Boar’ pub. In Act I there is no hint of the sea on-stage though it is ever-present in the music. In Act II Scene 1 you get a hint of a typically grey Suffolk seascape. Grimes’s hut is constructed from two walls and the rearranged benches. The Moot Hall in Act III is only hinted at but the stage clears to show us at the bleak shoreline for Grimes’s dismal dénouement. Brigitte Reiffenstuel’s costumes make the setting even more redolent of Walmington-on-Sea from Dad’s Army but this reference would I believe be lost on the American director and his team.
It is perhaps one of the finest evenings of music-theatre I have attended at the London Coliseum for many years; the soloists, chorus and orchestra were on top form. It didn’t all work but there were some unforgettable moments such as the coup de théâtre when Grimes lets the rope helping his apprentice down the cliff fall loose from his hands as he panics when ‘the Borough’ approaches his hut and the choruses repeated menacing calls of ‘Grimes … Peter Grimes’ after having waved small Union Jacks. The prospective horrors of mob-rule are only too obvious at this moment as they set out to pursue Grimes. This all comes at the expense of a loss of feeling that there is a real community here and this is not helped by David Alden giving the chorus and other performers random movements when they sing ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’ and elsewhere in their contributions to accentuate the music that has no real dramatic purpose other than to be distracting. It is possible we are seeing these events, such as the ‘fancy dress’ dance at the start of Act III, through the confused reality of the laudanum-addled Mrs Sedley but that is most unlikely.
Mrs Sedley in her twin-set and with her ‘Murder most foul it is’ and ‘Crime, which my hobby is’ is none other than Miss Marple and this is part of a very closely observed collection of vignettes for the leading characters. The Nieces are child abuse victims often in school uniform clutching dolls in school uniform too and the sisters rarely let go of each other. Ned Keene is the sharply-dressed spiv who can get everything for everyone. Auntie is an androgynous Vita Sackville-West figure in stripy-suit and fur coat with a club-foot and walking stick. Perhaps Captain Balstrode seems the most normal commentor on the things happening around him. There is even some revisionism to the character of Ellen Orford who shows a lack of compassion for the plight of Grimes’s apprentice. Perhaps Grimes is the only unmarried man in the Borough or she is obligated to him in some way. More likely she thinks she can redeem him but gives up when she realises there is no hope for them and takes her first available way out of the impending marriage when Grimes’s treatment of the boy gives her that opportunity.
All the roles were well cast with good singing actors – Felicity Palmer, a gossipy Mrs Sedley, Rebecca de Pont Davies as the procuress Auntie and Gerald Finley a sympathetic Captain Balstrode - who bring their characters to life with their strong singing. In fact all the other smaller roles added to the wonderful ensemble created including Michael Colvin’s intemperate Bob Boles, the Methodist, and Leigh Melrose’s, Ned Keene, who reappears in Act III Scene 1 with his trousers at half-mast. Amanda Roocroft as Ellen sings very strongly and with little sense of vulnerability, her anguish at the end more a result of her realising Grimes is a lost cause and that she was misguided to ever think she could save him.
The Australian Stuart Skelton seemed to have Jon Vickers’s portrayal in mind as Grimes. Vickers was a strange man who would not sing Tannhäuser and the young Siegfried because of the dubious morality of their characters but he embraced Grimes. His Grimes was lost in reverie one moment yet erupted with brutality the next. Here in Act II Grimes tenderly kisses Ellen before slapping her almost making us miss this important violent outburst. Stuart Skelton is not a real heldentenor like Vickers and has an essentially lyrical voice; there is much vocal grace to his quiet singing even if it was sometime a little like crooning. These gentler moments made his powerful outbursts even more threatening. Every word was clearly heard and this added to the impact of his portrayal. He is also awkwardly built and with this natural cumbersomeness and his baby-faced appearance it was easy to imagine someone who was bullied when young and is now a bully himself. At the end he is all so very much alone and Ellen does not help him push the boat out as in the libretto states.
According to David Alden Peter Grimes ‘lies halfway between Anything Goes and Wozzeck’ – Wozzeck yes but it is hard to discern where the Cole Porter is. The closest to the Broadway influence Alden suggests is in the work would lie with the Gershwin-inspired second ‘Storm’ Interlude. This and the others evoking, where appropriate, dawn, Sunday morning, moonlight, the raging sea and village life were atmospherically played by the ENO Orchestra sounding better than it has for many years to my hearing. Edward Gardner’s account was rich in orchestral detail and colours and even though it was perhaps a little carefully paced at times nevertheless it was nuanced, impassioned and illuminating.
My final tribute goes to the enhanced ENO chorus and their chorus master, Martin Merry, for their important contribution to the evening’s success. Their savage cries for vengeance will live long in my memory and they acted with great commitment throughout even when performing the ludicrous ‘hand-jiving’ David Alden wanted them to do.
Photo by George Mott
Dominic McHugh, musicalcriticism.com, 12 May 2009
http://www.musicalcriticism.com/opera/eno-grimes-0509.shtml
Four out of five stars
Practically everyone is deranged in David Alden's new production of Britten's Peter Grimes for English National Opera. While it's hardly original to suggest that Grimes isn't quite there, mentally speaking, the weird behaviour of the rest of the Borough is something new, and here taken to an absolute extreme.
Auntie dresses as a man and has a lame foot, while her Nieces are dressed like schoolgirls and act with hardly a semblance of sanity most of the time, fetishising their toy dolls, wrapping themselves in the same overcoat almost like Siamese twins, and mimicking each other's actions in the most eerie fashion. The action is updated to the Second World War – the time of Britten's composition rather than Crabbe's original poem, The Borough – and though the society of the Suffolk village is conventionally presented as closed, the signs of war are apparent in the crazy behaviour of much of the community, in the absence of the young, and in Balstrode's physical damage (he has lost an arm, presumably in battle). When the Borough goes to hunt down Grimes in the final act, Union Jacks are suddenly wielded, as if to suggest that their mob mentality is justified by Queen and country.
Up to a point, it works very well. Alden's direction of the singers is totally immaculate: they act with a sense of purpose throughout, and the focus really is on the drama, without the slightest whiff of a stock operatic gesture. That's particularly impressive in the choral scenes, where the amount of detail and movement he achieves is astounding. At the opening, the chorus is at the back of the stage, half-submerged by a sharply-raised platform; later on, they turn on Grimes and all point their fingers at him, while the raising of the Bible against him in the opening scene of Act 2 is another effective gesture. I found the second scene of Act 2 chilling in the way Grimes should be: again, a raked platform for Grimes' hut puts the drama literally on a knife's edge, and the flickering of a single light bulb makes the scene especially evocative, so that when the villagers come to spy on Grimes there's a brilliantly spooky atmosphere.
But it's a shame that some things are taken to excess. Alden spoils his impeccable stagecraft with some perverse interpretative gestures. And I don't think the portrayal of either Ellen Orford or particularly Balstrode is coherently worked out. When Ellen delivers the new apprentice, there is almost a sense that she is consciously sending the boy to his death with Grimes so that the latter's fate can also be sealed to rid the Borough of his presence, so that she's clearly demonised sometimes, yet the text constantly makes it clear that Ellen is on Grimes' side. Balstrode, meanwhile, seems to be too much in confrontation with Grimes in the first act, while defending him in other scenes. The grotesque aspects of the production do not appeal to me at all, either, be it the strange behaviour of Auntie and her Nieces, or the fancy dress party in the third act. Grimes' mad scene is beautifully staged against a grey skyscape, but I didn't like the remote positioning of Ellen and Balstrode at the sides of the stage at the very end: it makes them seem disengaged from what's going on, rather than active participants.
Similarly, although the final quartet of the first scene of Act 2 was moving, I thought Ellen's distant behaviour towards the apprentice when she discovers the scars Grimes has caused was totally incoherent with the text. The physical appearance of the Boar's Head was rather cluttered and less atmospheric than several other productions I've seen, but when the back of the roof lifted to reveal the storm raging outside, the effect was dramatic. In other words, the staging was frustrating one minute and probingly original the next.
It is, however, a splendid night at the theatre, and even if the production weren't so successful on the whole, it would be worth the trip to the Coliseum just for Stuart Skelton's performance as Grimes. His is truly one of the finest portrayals of any role I have ever seen. Alone amongst the cast, Skelton's performance is complete. On the one hand, he conveys Grimes' innocence whilst also making it clear that he's mentally disturbed, while on the other, the amount of colour he brings to his singing is remarkable. He's also alone, I feel, in fully achieving a Brittenesque style of singing. The finest Britten singers use vibrato in an expressive way that can be quite special, as Skelton shows, but too often the singing here was full-on and did not embrace the neo-Classical aspect of the music. Skelton, however, responds to the text on the most minute level, creating different sounds even within a single note: he makes the part very much his own.
Amanda Roocroft's acting as Ellen Orford was heart-rending and she sang with full commitment, but the line wasn't quite as easy or nuanced as some interpreters achieve in the part. On the other hand, Gerald Finley sang with marvellous power in the first act, and it's a shame that the director's intervention had such a detrimental effect on his character. Not so Felicity Palmer, who relished the Miss Marple-ish characterisation given to her by Alden and always made a huge impact when she was on the stage.
Leigh Melrose's Ned Keene, Matthew Best's Swallow, Michael Colvin's Bob Boles and Rebecca de Pont Davies's Auntie were all fine examples of ensemble singing – indeed, the company very much inhabited the opera as an ensemble who gelled with one another. The ENO Chorus hasn't sounded in such impressively strong voice in a long time, and for them it was a wholly successful evening: the choral numbers were uniformly rousing and exciting, which helped to make Alden's interpretation more workable.
ENO Music Director Edward Gardner has seldom produced such drive and visceral energy from his orchestra and chorus, and on those grounds alone the evening was a success. The commitment and thrust was a pleasure to witness, and this was without doubt the finest production of ENO's season so far. However, on an ultra-critical level I can't help but feel that the chilling quality of the music was not achieved during a large percentage of the evening: Gardner is good at the modernity and spikiness, but does not draw the colour, the unique musical tinta, from some of the voices and instruments that a number of other conductors – most recently in London, Colin Davis and Antonio Pappano – have shown can be obtained from this amazing score. Perhaps the reason is that Gardner, like Alden, does not see this as an opera of the sea and seeks for something more universally exciting but less distinctive.
But no matter: this is an all-out triumph for ENO, and the communal feeling of wanting to grip the audience ultimately succeeds.
Photo by George Mott
Simon Thomas, Whatsonstage,com, 13 May 2009
http://www.whatsonstage.com/index.php?pg=207&story=E8831242116569&title=Peter+Grimes
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
We’ve not been without great performances of Peter Grimes in recent years – from Willy Decker’s exquisitely beautiful realisation at Covent Garden to Phyllida Lloyd’s chilling Opera North interpretation – but David Alden’s new ENO production takes us to undreamed-of heights.
For some, Alden’s expressionistic approach is going to be too emotionally extreme and lacking in lyricism but, for me, this is what opera in the 21st Century should be all about.
Edward Gardner, proving again what an asset he is to the company, conducts a performance that electrifies from the first note to the last. Alden brings the main tabs in during the interludes, which both shocks theatrically and forces us to listen to the music without visual distraction. Gardner provides all the colour, excitement and terror that Britten’s magnificent score demands.
Paul Steinberg’s sets and Adam Silverman’s lighting are the perfect background to a production that stretches the opera in unforeseen directions. The shadowy borough lours over the action, with stark light bouncing off mottled steel and angular walls, against a backdrop of broodingly dark clouds. The scene in Grimes’ hut, a steeply sloping platform with precipitately high ladder and everything out of kilter, is stunningly realised and the death of the apprentice conceived with horrific realism.
Dominating all, Stuart Skelton’s towering Grimes is balanced somewhere between the rigorous masculinity of Vickers and the lyrical beauty of Pears and Langridge. The ambiguity of the character is unavoidable – he is undoubtedly both hero and villain - but the final picture of Skelton’s broken fisherman is wrenching and unforgettable. His “God have mercy upon me” (something that echoes hauntingly throughout the rest of the opera) almost literally lifted me from my seat.
Alden’s depiction of the society against which the tragedy of Grimes and his apprentices is played out is quite extraordinary. The chorus, resembling the asylum lunatics of Peter Brook’s Marat/Sade, shake the building with astonishing force, each one a clearly defined and terrifying character.
Emerging from the communal haze are a number of crazily-conceived characterisations. As one would expect from Felicity Palmer, the interfering old bat Mrs Sedley is a piercingly vivid portrayal but other artists who perhaps in the past haven’t had so many chances to shine give brilliant performances. Rebecca de Pont Davies’ Auntie is striking as a suit-wearing drag king on a raggedy throne (what a brilliant concept) and Leigh Melrose, not seen nearly often enough on the opera stage, a shudderingly slimy spiv as Ned Keene.
Gillian Ramm and Mairéad Buicke are the weirdest nieces imaginable, squirming and gyrating like automatons, weighed and ground down by a wildly dysfunctional society. Their scene with Ellen Orford and Auntie in Act Two – surely one of the most beautiful passages in all opera – is heartbreaking.
Gerald Finley’s natural lyricism is swallowed-up in his tortured, one-armed Balstrode, a far cry from the usual wise and sympathetic old sea-dog. Clutching the walls like a character from The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, he gives us a man clearly suffering from a deeply troubled past. Amanda Roocroft, fresh from her triumph as Jenufa, is a still emotional centre as Ellen Orford.
Alden’s Peter Grimes affects you on all levels: intellectual, emotional and even physical. I found myself twisting and turning all evening like a skewered fish. You can’t ask more of opera.
Photo by Clive Barda
Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 17 May 2009
Britten's story of brutality and paranoia in a wartime fishing village is as powerful today as it was in 1945
A few months before the 1945 premiere of Peter Grimes, Britain was gripped by a tragedy that briefly knocked the war from the front pages.
On 9 January, a 12-year-old boy named Dennis O'Neill died of cardiac failure after being brutally beaten by his foster father, Reginald Gough. Severely undernourished, with septic ulcers on his feet, Dennis had been dead for several hours by the time a doctor was called.
Though Gough had a previous conviction, neither of the councils responsible for the care of Dennis and his younger brothers had questioned his suitability as a foster parent. A report recommending "immediate removal" of the children had been ignored. On 19 March, Gough was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to six years in prison, his wife, Esther, got six months "for exposing the said child in a manner likely to cause unnecessary injury". Public outrage was so intense that the Home Secretary ordered an inquiry, the results of which were published nine days before the premiere of Britten's opera.
What must it have been like for those who sat in Sadler's Wells on 7 June? Did they think of the O'Neill boy during Swallow's cursory inquest into the death of Grimes's first apprentice? Did they share the rage of The Borough? Did they want to pursue Grimes/Gough to his death? Or were they seduced by the cold glamour of "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades", the sequinned savagery of the Sea Interludes?
Designed by Paul Steinberg, with costumes by Brigitte Reiffenstuel and lighting by Adam Silverman, David Alden's English National Opera production thrusts us into the anxious year of the opera's first performance. It's a spectacular knees-up of carefully darned stockings, utility dresses, Boadicea-themed pageants and defiant Union Jacks filtered through the mistrustful eyes of those with a very different experience of the wartime spirit. This is Aldeburgh as a George Grosz nightmare of distorted streets, incontinent drunks and flaring tempers, with a cross-dressing Auntie (Rebecca de Pont Davies) styled after Otto Dix and accessorised with a club foot.
Everyone is damaged, from the self-pleasuring spiv Ned Keane (Leigh Melrose), to Matthew Best's Swallow (seen with his trousers round his ankles), the laudanum-, crime fiction- and hatred-addicted Mrs Sedley (Felicity Palmer), and Darren Jeffery's Hobson (complicit in the trafficking of orphans). In pigtails and school uniforms, Auntie's prepubescent nieces (Gillian Ramm and Mairéad Buicke) service the desires of this twisted community, echoing their arguments in the jerking movements of their rag-dolls. In full dress uniform, Gerald Finley's Captain Balstrode is missing an arm, while Ellen Orford (Amanda Roocroft) and Grimes (Stuart Skelton) argue over the new apprentice, John (Benny Gur), like the worst of parents: one dangerously sentimental, the other too ruined by violence to do more than rage.
Vocally, you could not wish for better. Chorus and principals blaze with intensity and the orchestra gleams under Edward Gardner, its sound finally and gloriously established. But just as Alden has amplified Britten's argument that the community is at fault, so he has weakened the work's already compromised moral core. John's death – brilliantly executed on stage – is here unarguably accidental, the nature of Grimes's earlier crimes unexplored, the O'Neill case of 1945, and those since, again forgotten in the thrill of an operatic triumph.
Photo by Clive Barda
Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 17 May 2009
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/opera/article6288240.ece
Radical reinterpretation of Peter Grimes
David Alden’s new staging of Britten’s work for English National Opera echoes why Sadler’s Wells had 1945 world premiere
David Alden’s technically immaculate, interpretatively audacious new staging of Britten’s Peter Grimes for English National Opera is a triumphant vindication of the ensemble-theatre values that garnered ENO’s parent company, Sadler’s Wells Opera, the world premiere of this astonishing masterpiece in 1945. After the pretentious self-advertisement of Katie Mitchell’s After Dido at the Young Vic, it’s good, too, to see a director back at the London Coliseum whose belief in opera as an art form has a galvanising effect on soloists and chorus on stage, underpinned by superlative conducting and playing from ENO’s youthful music director, Edward Gardner, and his orchestra in the pit.
Alden began the opera season at Covent Garden with a wacky, anarchic and sumptuous staging of Cavalli’s bawdy baroque comedy La Calisto, and here he demonstrates his range with an austere, harrowing, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful yet equally subversive account of this British classic, quite unlike any I have seen before.
Setting the opera either during the second world war or shortly afterwards — the period of the creation and first performance — Alden peers deeply into the entrails of Britten’s drama of a persecuted outsider, pursued to madness and death by the bigoted hysteria of a smug and hypocritical community: the Borough — an alias for Britten’s adopted home, Aldeburgh — in George Crabbe’s poem, source of Montagu Slater’s libretto.
The American director turns what is usually accepted as the kernel of the plot on its head, but in so doing he makes us look all too closely at the issues that Britten and Slater confront in this powerful drama. It makes for uncomfortable watching. Alden’s premise is that the denizens of the Borough are barking mad, that Grimes is saner than the lot of them, and they won’t rest until they have also driven him mad. Justice Swallow (Matthew Best) suggests a seedy Dr Crippen, the apothecary Ned Keene (Leigh Melrose) is a boozing, drug-crazed spiv, while the town nosy parker, Mrs Sedley (the eternal Felicity Palmer), is a maniacal Miss Marple with a permanent bad smell under her nose. The vicar (Stuart Kale) ogles Auntie’s schoolgirl nieces and dances with a man in drag in the Act III knees-up.
Alden’s masterpiece — and his most controversial departure from the text — is the depiction of Auntie and her “nieces”. Instead of the usual buxom, good-heartedly raucous landlady, Rebecca de Pont Davies plays a sinister refugee from pre-Nazi Germany, a cross-dressing, club-footed Otto Dix harpie in a mink coat, brandishing a Poirot walking stick. The girls (Gillian Ramm, Mairead Buicke) meanwhile behave like autistic twins, carrying dolls dressed like themselves. They are the female counterweights to Grimes’s roughly treated second apprentice — a poleaxing performance by young Benny Gur, who seethes quietly with rage and hurt.
Alden preserves the sense of Britten identifying with Grimes, the outsider. The death of the apprentice John occurs when Grimes is startled by the approaching voices and accidentally lets the rope slip. At the end of the scene, we see him cradling the dead boy’s body in heart-rending despair.
Alden seems to be making the pertinent point that we can’t shirk collective responsibility for the abuse of children. One of his production’s most telling scenes is the one-sided interview on the seafront outside the church, when Ellen Orford asks John to explain the tear in his coat and the bruise on his shoulder. She is embarrassed, uncomfortable, almost refusing to acknowledge the evidence she sees before her eyes.
What makes the production so compelling, however, is the inexorable theatrical momentum Alden builds up to the man-hunt, with the chorus, dementedly wide-eyed and bare-teethed, baying for Grimes’s blood and his nightmarish Auntie wearing the head of a boar — her pub/brothel’s name — laughing demonically. This terrifying coup de théâtre has something of the horror factor of Jack Torrance’s hallucinations in Kubrick’s seminal chiller, The Shining — a breathtaking moment of music theatre. The thrilling ENO chorus pins you to the back of your seat.
The three principals would grace any opera house in the world: Amanda Roocroft’s limpidly sung, conflicted, vulnerable Ellen is as emotionally damaged as Gerald Finley’s handsome and handsomely sung Captain Balstrode is physically disabled (he has lost an arm). It is the Grimes of the young Australian Stuart Skelton — surely the finest on a London stage since the celebrated Jon Vickers — who sets the seal on the evening. His burly frame and heldentenorish timbre do not preclude singing of the most inward and eloquent vulnerability in the Great Bear monologue and the Mad Scene.
Here, with Grimes’s voice accompanied by distant a cappella chorus and tuba foghorn, and in the skeletal celesta and solo strings postlude to the apprentice’s fatal fall, Edward Gardner emphasises Britten’s debt to Berg’s Wozzeck and Lulu, but he pulls out the stops magnificently for the grand-operatic episodes where Britten’s models are Puccini and Verdi. This Grimes, without doubt, is the must-see operatic event of the entire 2008/9 London season.
David Gillard, Daily Mail,14 May 2009
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1181769/Welcome-little-Britten-.html
FIVE OUT OF FIVE STARS
Welcome to little Britten...
Few operas have explored the plight of the tormented loner and small-town bigotry more eloquently than Britten's storm-lashed masterpiece.
And few stagings have portrayed the opera's anguish or anger more searingly than David Alden's nerve-tearing new production for English National Opera.
It was this company (then Sadler's Wells opera) that gave the premiere of this groundbreaking opera back in 1945.
And, in 1991, Tim Albery regenerated the work in this house with an ENO production that packed a stinging punch.
There are certainly some similarities between Albery's and Alden's view - the use of the chorus as a braying, Bible-thumping lynch-mob is one.
But Alden's surreal take on the sadistic fisherman and his hypocritical tormentors is far more off-the-wall. This is the East Coast as 'little Britain', peopled by creepy, Union Jack-waving provincial grotesques.
Paul Steinberg's sets conjure up a bleak seascape and a sense of claustrophobia, while Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes move the psycho-drama from the 1820s to the 1940s.
The orchestral playing under music director Edward Gardner is phenomenal and the cast is one of the strongest yet.
A highly-strung virtuoso
The supporting roles are brilliantly achieved: Amanda Roocroft moving as a liberated Ellen Orford; Gerald Finley playing Captain Balstrode as a stiff-upper-lipped retired naval officer; Rebecca de Pont Davies adding sexual ambivalence as louche landlady Auntie; and Leigh Melrose hilarious as the spiv Ned Keene. And who could forget Felicity Palmer, who plays Mrs Sedley as a malicious Miss Marple?
Towering in the title role, there is Australian tenor Stuart Skelton. His burly misfit has the power of Jon Vickers without the vocal rasp. Skelton's Grimes is pure heldentenor, a maritime Siegfried.
Verdict: Storm the box office
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 17 Sunday May
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/may/17/opera-review-peter-grimes-coliseum
This is why Britten is so great
Stuart Skelton excels as Peter Grimes in an unmissable production that unleashes the opera's thrilling power
Early in Peter Grimes, Britten's 1945 masterpiece, the antihero fisherman of the title sings: "What harbour shelters peace, away from tidal waves, away from storms?" These evocative words, a reminder that Montagu Slater's abused libretto has more good lines than bad, haunt the opera. It's the existential question we ask ourselves every day, of life's weather and our hopes.
The essence inhabits the music, a soaring phrase - a hair-raising leap of a major ninth, enough to tax the most agile of voices, especially sung pianissimo - its impact at once bright and dissonant. Beneath the surface, a tide of dark harmonies tugs in hostile opposition. Within moments, the storm has burst and Grimes's whispered yearnings are drowned by an almighty orchestral squall. Britten's dramatic instinct is faultless.
This was one of many breathtaking moments in English National Opera's exceptional new Peter Grimes, conducted by the company's music director, Edward Gardner, in David Alden's staging which opened at the Coliseum last week. Four days later, fresh from this briny triumph, ENO learnt it had won the 2009 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Opera and Music Theatre, for its "distinctive artistic identity", as well as its brave collaborations with the Young Vic. An outstanding week for a company which, floundering two years ago, now rules the waves.
It is especially fitting that the RPS accolade should coincide with this greatest of English operas. The company has an umbilical link with Grimes. The first performance was given in June 1945, one month after VE Day, by Sadler's Wells Opera, which would later become ENO. That premiere was rapturously received, a landmark event in 20th-century musical history. Even the diffident, 31-year-old Britten considered it "an omen", as positive a description as he dared use, for the future of English opera. History has shaken down the work's reputation and proved him right.
ENO's production is blessed with a magnificent Grimes in Stuart Skelton. Lumbering, vulnerable, bullying, helpless, the Australian tenor radiates a musical intelligence as electrifying as it is heartbreaking. He convincingly unites the visionary, floating lines of the loner desperate for the safe love of Ellen Orford, with the brutal yawls of the thug whose callousness leads to the deaths of his boy apprentices. The moral uncertainty at the centre of this work, sometimes oversimplified with too much indulgence shown to the character of Grimes, could hardly be clearer. No one is heroic, no one without stain, not even kindly Ellen, played with tender, anguished generosity by Amanda Roocroft. In the end, one can only stand and watch and weep as Grimes blunders to his doom.
Alden, whose production of Janacek's Jenufa has been among ENO's recent successes, has updated the work to the 1940s era of its composition. In contrast, Paul Steinberg's stylish sets, a mix of naturalistic seascape and geometric abstraction, lit with sharp, silvery definition by Adam Silverman, are timeless. The men of the Borough, the Suffolk hypocrites of George Crabbe's 1810 poem, wear wide trousers, square shoulders and trilbies; their womenfolk sport large bags, small hats, short skirts, heavy shoes. Some are war wounded, including the one-armed Captain Balstrode, decent but weak, ever darting behind the sea wall and emerging as the community's worrying conscience. Gerald Finley, now expert at conscience-stricken roles as his recent Doctor Atomic at ENO demonstrated, was superb.
There's plenty to object to in Alden's fussy interventions, if you feel inclined. The choreographed gestures of the caricatured care-in-the-community crowd grow wearisome. The villagers are stylised into narrow, Llareggub "types". Auntie, the imperious landlady of the Boar, becomes an Otto Dix-style cabaret dyke, sinuously played by a lynx-like Rebecca de Pont Davies. Her kinky, smack-me schoolgirl nieces, the vivacious Gillian Ramm and Mairéad Buick, have to writhe and gyrate round each other's legs long after the sapphic joke has worn thin. Presumably, this is an inversion of the widely held view, not specifically evident in the text, that Britten was drawing parallels with his outsider "queer" status.
Likewise, Ned Keene (Leigh Melrose) is a lounge lizard pimp servicing the laudanum addict, Mrs Sedley, played with glorious frumpishness by Felicity Palmer, who can still sing out and be heard above a fortissimo chorus and orchestra going full tilt. Swallow (Matthew Best), the grease-ball lawyer, gets caught with his trousers down at Auntie's orgy and down they stay, round his ankles, Brian Rix farce-style, for several minutes. Surely, though I may be wrong here, male instinct would be to pull them up pronto, if only to be able to walk.
Yet these excesses are incidental, mere buzzing irritations on the surface of an indestructible work of genius. Alden's passionate, and musical, understanding of the work is beyond question. The cast is superb. The main roles are all first class, the fervour and expertise of the orchestra under Gardner thrilling. Never has the well-drilled chorus sounded better, shouting their accusations from the gutting tables as murderously as the crowds in Bach's St Matthew Passion call for Christ's crucifixion.
The greatest revelation - and all credit to Gardner and his ever-alert ENO musicians - is how alive and miraculously ear-bending this familiar score still sounds. Britten reinvents the possibilities of musical language, now sea breeze, now gull in flight, now tempest, now glittering dawn. And you sit there, foolishly thinking you knew the piece quite well, wondering how on earth he does it. Unmissable.
Robert Hugill, MVDaily.com, 13 May 2009
http://www.mvdaily.com/articles/2009/05/petergrimes.htm
Coherently Brilliant
When David Alden's new production of Peter Grimes for English National Opera at the London Coliseum opened (seen Saturday 9 May 2009), Paul Steinberg's set was a relatively plain box and the chorus were confined to the rear. From the outset the crowd were unsympathetic, adding jeers to their comments. There was no attempt to set the scene realistically as an inquest, but as Matthew Best's strong Swallow mentioned witnesses they stepped forward, thus helping us to identify them. Stuart Skelton's bulky Peter Grimes was isolated from the crowd from the start.
For the opening of Act 1 the set remained substantially the same, so that instead of taking place on the open quayside, the action took place in a fish processing shed with no view of the sea. This lack of an open view seemed to be deliberate: Alden's take on the people of the Borough emphasised their narrow closed-in nature. Brigitte Reiffenstuel's costumes established the time period as the 1940s, presumably intended to reflect the troubled time when Britten and Pears left England as conscientious objectors.
In the opening scene of Act 1, Britten and his librettist, Montagu Slater, neatly establish all of the characters and Alden used this to introduce us to his version of events. Auntie (Rebecca de Pont Davies) had a mannish hair cut, wore a man's three piece suit and tie, and topped the whole outfit by carrying a cane. Her nieces (Gillian Ramm, Mairead Buicke) were rather disturbingly dressed as schoolgirls carrying dolls (dressed in the same clothes as the nieces). Their behaviour was strange, almost autistic and they had a way of creepily insinuating themselves into the action, whether singing or not. Ned Keene (Leigh Melrose) was a pill-popping caricature of a spiv. Mrs Sedley was a drug-addled mad old lady. And so it continued.
Instead of creating a cast of characters who fitted naturally into the life of the Borough, Alden created a group of caricatures, backed by the scary chorus. From the outset you realised that the Borough was a terrible place, full of in-bred oddities. In fact if the League of Gentlemen did Peter Grimes as a Christmas special then it would be very like this, with the Borough as Royston Vasey.
This meant that only the three principals, Grimes (Stuart Skelton), Ellen Orford (Amanda Roocroft) and Balstrode (Gerald Finley) were anything like normal. But Ellen seemed to be emotionally damaged by her widowhood, something beautifully captured by Amanda Roocroft. And Balstrode wasn't the bluff retired sea-dog usually portrayed, but instead a relatively young naval captain retired due to ill health (he lacked an arm). This altered the dynamic and later in the opera Alden and Finley made it very clear that Balstrode was in love with Ellen himself.
I had always believed that the intention of Britten and Slater was to portray how the Borough's hounding of Grimes comes out of nothing and goes back to nothing, how ordinary people can do extraordinary acts. This is why the very closing scene of the opera is intended to portray the same type of events as the opening of Act 1, the borough just starting another day with Grimes forgotten.
But here, Alden's vision of dystopia meant that the Borough were culpable from the start and Grimes was not punished for being different to the ordinary folk, but for being different to a bunch of weirdos. The dramatic balance was completely altered. The result worked dramatically and Alden got good performances out of his cast, but this was Grimes warped and distorted.
The chorus created a single, rather bigoted unit from the start. By the time we came to the end of the scene in The Boar, the chorus were really scary indeed. So much so that you wondered where there was to go when they were whipped up into a frenzy in Act 3.
Any tolerance I had for Alden's view of the work rather evaporated in the opening scene of Act 3 where the dance in the moot hall was turned into a bizarre fancy dress ball where everyone behaved as badly as possible. Ned Keene was drunk, or worse, Swallow wore a pink tutu and danced on top of a bucket. Auntie wore an animal's head, and the Revd Horace Adams (Stuart Kale) seemed to be having sex with another man. The crowd scene at the end of this was very scary indeed, but Alden seemed to be implying that this was a VE Day celebration or something as they all brought out union flags at one point. The chorus' antagonism was hardly as scary as it should have been as it wasn't a surprise, given their earlier behaviour.
In amongst this rather unsatisfactory state of things, Stuart Skelton created a superb portrait of Grimes. Skelton's Grimes is beautifully sung and I hope he manages to keep this as he develops the role dramatically. At the moment the main weakness was that his violence was not really believable. I remember Jon Vickers in the role, using his bulk to make us believe in a man whose physical frustration would lead him to lash out. Vickers was profoundly gifted in the Inn scene and in Grimes' final scene when he vividly portrays Grimes' poetic nature and madness. Skelton has not quite got this aspect yet; he suggests the poetry and the madness but could make it more vivid, more innate in Grimes' character. That said, Skelton's Grimes was one of the best portrayals of the role I have heard in recent years. He is a relatively young singer and has a lot of time to develop his fine portrayal.
I don't think that Amanda Roocroft is one of the world's natural Ellen Orfords. The high lying cantilena of the embroidery aria and other sections did not come easily to her. But that said, this was her role début and the role will bed into her voice. Where she was convincing was in conveying Ellen's troubles: I have never seen a production in which Ellen's damaged nature was so vividly conveyed. Here, Ellen's love wasn't disinterested: it arose out of her own desperate need. She and Grimes were two damaged creatures trying to come together, and inevitably failing.
Gerald Finley's beautifully-sung Balstrode formed a third in this damaged relationship. I missed the sense of distance that having Balstrode as an older voice can bring, Finley's Balstrode was deeply involved in the relationship between Ellen and Grimes. In fact, there were times when Finley's singing seemed too beautiful; you wanted something rougher, more down to earth.
For the opening of Act 2 and the close of the opera Paul Steinberg did open the stage up, giving us a view of an endless and stormy horizon. At the close, when Grimes has gone, Alden made his final disturbing alteration to the dramaturgy. Instead of reverting to the opening of Act 1 scene 1, the chorus simply assembled and instead of going about their daily tasks, the focus was very much on Ellen Orford's pain and grief. Though Roocroft portrayed this wonderfully, it was a mistake; at the end we should get some feeling for the cycle of life going on.
The smaller roles were all well cast and all the singers created the sort of distorted characters which Alden wanted. Leigh Melrose was a finely acted Ned Keene; Rebecca de Pont Davies' Auntie became a sort of commentator, laughing at the action; Gillian Ramm and Mairead Buicke were suitably (or unsuitably) disturbing as the nieces. Michael Colvin was an intolerant Bob Boles, but in amongst all the madness he was simply one of many. Matthew Best was a strong Swallow. Stuart Kale as Revd Horace Adams and Darren Jeffery as Hobson both created neat characters. Felicity Palmer's Mrs Sedley was wonderfully demented.
The diction from all concerned was exemplary and we did not need surtitles.
Whilst I had my doubts about Alden's production, there is no doubting that he got superb performances from cast and chorus. This, combined with Edward Gardner's fine musical direction meant that from a musico-dramatic point of view, the evening was a triumph. I cannot remember the last time that ENO created such a coherently brilliant musical evening.
Warwick Thompson, Bloomberg, 20 May 2009
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aq7LfEK5kkAk
Rating: 3½ out of 4 stars
Glam Lesbian Is Funky Barmaid in ‘Peter Grimes’: London Stage
A glamorous lesbian with a stylishly severe haircut and a long fur coat is one of the surprising inhabitants of a poor 1940s fishing village in a new London production of “Peter Grimes.”
She certainly seems an unlikely figure to run the shabby local pub. Two mentally unstable schoolgirls who twitch and stare blankly into space are employed as freakish attractions for her customers too.
Lively, it certainly is. Does it help tell the story? I’m not so sure. Benjamin Britten’s 1945 work, now at the English National Opera, is about a lonely fisherman who is accused of mistreating his apprentices. Rumors about his behavior then turn his neighbors into an angry mob, blind with self-righteousness.
Productions of the opera often focus on the ambiguity of Grimes’s actions: Do his apprentices really die in accidents? Has something worse happened? Is Grimes just a scapegoat?
Director David Alden makes it clear that Grimes isn’t a murderer, and shifts attention to the hypocrisy of his neighbors. He presents us with a series of expressionistic character portraits, including the mannish Peter Grimes lesbian, the creepy schoolgirls and a sharp-suited, mustachioed crook.
They all walk with exaggerated, angular movements. In general, they suggest an urban, bohemian environment, even when Paul Steinberg’s set admirably creates a bleak ‘40s fishing village out of corrugated iron and gray wooden-slatted walls.
The social critique and the curious visual mismatch reduce the opera’s power to disturb by a notch. The same cannot be said of the singing and playing, which are superb.
Big-Voiced Pain
Tenor Stuart Skelton is a terrific and complex Grimes, and creates a blaze of anguish and pain with his huge voice. At times, he gives the impression of a hunted wild animal; at other moments, he can be boorish and brutal. Amanda Roocroft is full of tenderness as his friend Ellen, and Gerald Finley brings authority to the respected Captain Balstrode.
Edward Gardner conducts with vigor, and draws meaty and vivid playing from the orchestra: You can almost feel the salt spray. The expanded chorus makes a powerfully thrilling sound. It all makes a great impact, even if the production isn’t always as subtle as it might be.
Rob Ainsley, Sky Arts, May 2009
http://www.skyarts.co.uk/opera/article/review-peter-grimes-at-the-eno
Britten's dark tale of the fishing-village outsider driven to suicide by the mob gets a powerful performance here. There are some strange touches from director David Alden, but fine singing, blockbuster choruses, and intense musical performances make it memorable for the right reasons.
The niggles first. It's set here in 1945, when the opera was written, not a century earlier as per the score. Some of this works well. The postwar mud- and slate-coloured austerity wardrobe suits Britten's intense moods and musical buffet of cold-cuts. But the references to workhouses and carts jar. Sets are spare, effective at the end with the vast grey fen of a stage under huge dark clouds, but less so in the amateur-opera trestle tables of the Prologue and Act I.
There are too many gratuitous gimmicks. The 'nieces' – the village tarts – are dressed as schoolgirls, do weird stuff with dolls, and keep gesturing bizarrely as if directing traffic while playing hopscotch. What are they supposed to be doing? They didn't seem to have a clue themselves.
Other things irritate too. The group gestures in 'Old Joe', like a self-help group for cricket umpires with Tourette's; Grimes's evident affliction with cerebral palsy; Balstrode's missing left arm, and high voice when telling Grimes to sail to his death; Auntie's lesbian-madame suit and tie; the hopelessly anachronistic groin-kneeings in the misfiring Moot Hall dance.
No wonder the surtitlers literally lost the plot twice, blanking out for a minute or so before finding their way back.
And yet... there's plenty enough positives. Gerald Finley is an excellent voice of wisdom in Balstrode, diction clear and voice woodily authoritative as ever. Amanda Roocroft is a fine Ellen, full of naive compassion and then self-doubt, voice as sparkling as a sunlit sea.
And Stuart Skelton's barrel-torso Grimes is a winner, both bully and fantasist: the final scene, where he falls apart, was riveting and moving. He nailed it vocally too, being appropriately tense or lyrical in the top notes as required.
The orchestral interludes sounded as good as they've ever done. The whirling storm, shadowy moonlight, and misty herring-gull morning were a delight. But best of all were the choruses. They're central to Grimes, the murderous, lynch mob that still lurks in today's media-obsessed global village. And they were terrific here, particularly in the wild-eyed chants of 'Pe-ter-Griiiiimes!!!' near the end, the near-silences in between chilling the blood.
So not five-star. But still a profound, shocking experience thanks to some of the greatest English opera music every written. Well worth going to see.
Roderick Swanston, Times Literary Supplement, May 2009
From its opening on 7th June 1945 everyone has acknowledged the significance of Peter Grimes as a seminal work in English music and world opera. Its unique blend of lyricism, spiky neo-classicism, telling moments and heart-breaking poignancy have moved all but the stoniest of heart. Yet almost from the start a style grew up so powerful were Britten and Pears at preserving their stamp on subsequent performances. One of the most striking aspects of David Alden’s new ENO production and Edward Gardner’s masterly handling of the magnificent score is that one seems to hear the work again for the first time. I cannot think that anyone will outdo the ferocity with which Gardner makes the storm interlude burst upon our ears and nerves. It was almost frightening.
David Alden’s production is crammed with new ideas and perspectives. The date is ambivalent. Some characters such as Auntie and Ned Keene are transported to the 1920s. Grimes, Mrs Sedley and Ellen are harder to date since their costumes could place them anywhere between Crabbe’s Borough (1810) and the late 19th century. This mixing of appearances only serves to underline the timelessness of the characters. They are both real and archetypal. Mrs Sedley is the hypocritical moral voice of the village, gossiping and accusing, at the same time being a drug addict. Auntie is superbly translated to being a 1920s lesbian with her male clothing and limp. Like Grimes she now appears an outsider, and her nieces drop in age from teenage prostitutes to under-age ingénues ignorant of the drama unfolding around them.
It would be hard to list all the outstanding moments in the production, but some cannot go unremarked. Act 1 Scene 1 takes place indoors which at first I thought was going to displace the sea from its central as one of the powerful metaphors of the plot. But not so. Tables get turned to a mock-sea, but more importantly enclosed brings out another aspect, that of the inward-looking, claustrophobic aspects of the tight-knit community. As said above, when the storm hits only bit by bit can the villagers escape into the relative safety of the inn.
Another remarkable moment in the 2nd act is maintenance of the Alden’s view of Grimes’s ambivalence is in his hut when he is bailing out the rope which is preventing his new apprentice from falling down the 40 foot cliff. Panicked by the approaching lynch-mob he lets go of the rope. The boy falls, but who was really to blame? Grimes for his lack of presence of mind or the crowd for terrifying him. This is a magnificent coup de theatre. There are many more.
Musically the performance is the match of the production. Vocally and dramatically the chorus is like a crouching tiger. Its volume is almost overwhelming and the ominous way it surges forward in the trial, after church and on the way to punish Grimes is magnificent. Stuart Skelton is superb as Grimes. Once again his voice and stage-presence suggests his entrapment between his visions and his exclusion from the village. He is its scape-goat, but he is not without blame, not least for his carelessness towards his apprentices. Skelton’s Grimes shows burly defiance yet self-obsessed determination. On the opposite side is the tenderness, the pity of Ellen Orford sung so poignantly by Amanda Roocroft. Once again, Alden emphasizes here ‘outsiderness’ and this Roocroft captures with many nuances in her wonderful performance. Gerald Finley’s Captain Balstrode is equally strong, mixing resolution with sympathy: acting and singing share his strengths.
Apart from one or two intonation hiccoughs right at the start all the other roles are strongly cast, acted and sung. This makes for a superb theatrical evening. But musically it is perhaps even more striking. Edward Gardner’s view of the score pays little attention to the army of predecessors. The orchestra, chorus and soloists are galvanized into an electricity that produces a frisson throughout the opera house from the start. I have hardly ever heard the first sea interlude or the passacaglia so movingly played nor seem so much to illumine the interior world of the opera.
A word needs to be appended about lighting (Adam Silverman) and Sets (Paul Steinberg). Again superb. The bleakness of the sea-determined village is suggested by few props and scenery. A wide sky and quay-side is all, but the space made available allows characters psychologically separated to be physically ‘miles apart’ on stage. Despite the better weather in Act 2’s sunny morning there is always a suggestion of the bleak atmosphere that seems to push the villagers into their way of life. Act 3 Scene 1 uses the minimal set to great effect.
This is a truly outstanding production of a great operatic masterpiece. It needs to be seen.
Erica Jeal, Opera, July 2009
It's easy for English opera-goers to feel possessive about Peter Grimes. Not only does it bear the burden of being the defining English opera of the last three centuries; its claustrophobic, coastal setting is ineluctably written into the score. But does the coast always have to be that of the North Sea? Dangerously inward-looking societies are by no means exclusive to East Anglia, and a Grimes-like figure could find himself isolated almost anywhere on the world's shorelines.
David Alden's new production is certainly set in the UK - at one point the villagers wave little Union Jacks - but the New York director's view feels like that of an outsider. More than any other recent UK staging, this one points up Britten's Expressionist influences, most obviously Wozzeck-something Edward Gardner's urgent, driven reading of the score reinforces. The settings, designed by Paul Steinberg, are naturalistic, from the dreary fish-market hall after the Dawn interlude, to Auntie's spacious but armchair-filled tavern, to the promenade outside the church door, backed by a glittering if grey sea view. But several of the peripheral characters within them are grotesques who would be at home on an Otto Dix canvas, from Leigh Melrose's spivvy Ned Keene to Rebecca de Pont Davies's Auntie, dressed in a man's suit, walking slowly on an orthopaedic shoe, and dismissing all who come near her with a throaty, masculine laugh. Alden overeggs things in the case of the Nieces (Gillian Ramm and Mairead Buicke), who are twitching, glassy-eyed girls in school blazers (costumes are by Brigitte Reiffenstuel), constantly foregrounded - in case we miss the point about exploitation and psychological damage, or that this particular society is rotten to its core. As if, in this opera, we ever could.
What is most striking, even revelatory, about Alden's direction of the work is how believable he makes the relationship between Stuart Skelton's Grimes and Amanda Roocroft's Ellen. Most directors-or most successful ones-give the impression of having taken as their departure point the character of Grimes himself. At the centre of Alden's production is the pair as a couple. There is a believable physical attraction between them from their duet at the end of the court scene onwards, and from then on everything each does relates in some way to the other. In the Sunday Morning scene, we seem to witness (for once) a genuine break-up, with all the sadness, love, anger and resentment that entails; Grimes kisses Ellen in passionate confusion before he hits her. At the very end, the real tragedy almost seems to be Ellen's. Hemmed in by hostile villagers as they watch the boat sinking, she is left to a loveless existence in which one suspects that the chorus's earlier threat- 'You who help will share the blame' -is one on which the Borough will make good.
These details of the direction were only half the story. The two central performances were both excellent. Roocroft was at her glowing best, infusing Ellen's lines with tenderness but finding a gritty crescendo with which to confront the villagers. As for Skelton, it is hard to imagine a more complete, multi-faceted portrayal of Grimes than the Australian tenor offered us here. Skelton's voice, with the odd entirely appropriate rough edge or catch tempering a tenor of heft but surprising sweetness, fits the role wonderfully. 'Now the Great Bear' was begun on a tiny whisper of tone, the ensuing crescendo flawlessly controlled; his 'I'll marry Ellen!' outburst to Gerald Finley's one-armed Balstrode in the previous scene had been almost euphoric, painting him briefly as a hero in a more conventional sense. Yes, this Grimes was certainly rough in his treatment of his apprentice-the bruise so accusingly uncovered by the boy, tall and old enough to be a useful fisherman's help, was huge and very angry indeed-but one could argue all night about how culpable Grimes was in his death, having briefly let the tethering rope fall as the mob outside panicked him.
The kind of luxury casting that brought in Finley to play Balstrode was also represented in Felicity Palmer's formidable Mrs Sedley-Miss Marple gone sour-and Matthew Best's resonant Swallow, and there were no weak links elsewhere. Chorus and orchestra were unfailingly responsive, as they needed to be: conducting his first Grimes, Gardner swept the music onwards relentlessly. The Storm interlude, which is the one episode in this opera I have thought can sound dated, was here nothing of the sort, with the brass careering crazily on top of the texture; the Passacaglia, in which after an almost languid start Gardner corralled his forces bit by bit into a whirlwind of momentum, was even better.
It wasn't how one would always want to hear Grimes, but it was unflaggingly exciting, and fitted perfectly with the staging. And while some will have found Alden's staging a long way from their own ideas of how Grimes should be, perhaps the introduction of a critical and not entirely respectful outsider's view is a necessary part of the opera's progress. Peter Grimes will always be English National Opera's signature work. But it won't always be English.
Ruth Elleson, Opera Today, 13 May 2009
http://www.operatoday.com/content/2009/05/peter_grimes_en.php
In David Alden’s extraordinary new staging of Britten’s masterpiece, with sets by Paul Steinberg, the Borough is populated by stylised grotesques, a clever twist on the opera’s existing ‘Little England’ character stereotypes.
In one of the production’s creepiest moments, the big man-hunt chorus in the middle of Act 3 is accompanied by waving of miniature Union Jacks.
Everyone you focus on has a darker secret than the last. At the more normal end of the range are Felicity Palmer’s Miss Marple-esque Mrs Sedley and Leigh Melrose’s apparently speed-addicted Ned Keene. The most disturbing include Darren Jeffery’s Hobson, who appears to have a whole boy-killing factory of his own going on unnoticed right under everybody else’s noses. Weirdest of all are Auntie and the Nieces — Rebecca de Pont Davies as a club-footed cross-dresser with a pinstripe suit and walking cane, and Mairéad Buicke and Gillian Ramm as a pair of possessed zombie twins in identical school uniform and pigtails. The Nieces are the production’s only faintly jarring note, with their vacant and jerky choreography which makes them barely even recognisable as human beings, but if they have one dramatic function it’s giving a new layer of depravity to Bob Boles, Swallow and everybody else who shows a sexual interest in them. Perhaps they are the ultimate product of this diseased community.
Yes, it’s the norm here to be disturbed, deformed or damaged (even Balstrode, sung by the excellent Gerald Finley, is missing an arm — besides the costumes, this is the most obvious visual clue to the production’s 1940s setting, though Auntie seems a throwback to the 30s) and Peter and Ellen are seemingly the only complete and sane individuals among them. Although her even-temperedness and common sense make her stand out from her neighbours, Ellen is integrated into the community — a community where people do everything together, moving in swarms — but Grimes is a loner, and it is this and this alone which leads to his becoming the local scapegoat. By the end, they have poisoned him into madness, but at least he is able to escape through death. Ellen is the one who has to live with it all, and I dare say she fits right in with the rest of them after all she has been through. With Amanda Roocroft in the role, there are echoes of her recent, brilliant Jenufa here — a bright-natured, attractive young woman worn down through her experiences. At times her singing is shrill on top and her diction indifferent, but her character portrait is spot on, the relationship with Grimes filled with real tenderness.
The Australian tenor Stuart Skelton is as fine a Grimes as you could wish to hear, wielding both his large voice and burly physique with intelligence and subtlety. Emerging from the man-hunt and the subsequent pained calm of the final interlude, Alden’s staging of the mad scene is devastating in its simplicity: the surtitle screen and orchestra pit go dark, and Grimes is alone in the abyss beneath a grey and foggy sky. Skelton maximises the effect the solitude of the setting with a performance of heartbreaking vulnerability and emotional intensity.
As Grimes hears the drum-led procession approaching his hut — in a clear and chilling musical echo of his vision, moments earlier, of the first dead boy — he is distracted into letting go of the rope with which he is making safe John’s descent down the cliff. Thus the villagers become directly responsible both for the death of the apprentice and for Peter’s self-destruction as a result of it. It is a heart-stopping coup-de-theatre.
In the two years that Ed Gardner has been ENO’s Musical Director I don’t think he has ever drawn a better performance from the house orchestra than in this detailed but never fussy account of the score. The playing of the interludes was virtually faultless, with a particularly memorable brass timbre, the jazzy shape of the phrases in the Storm Interlude crafted so as to introduce the incongruous 1930s vintage of the inhabitants of the Boar. A number of remarkable and inventive Grimes stagings have been seen in London this decade, but musically, this is head and shoulders above the others. It is perhaps ENO’s finest musical achievement this decade.
George Hall, Opera News, August 2009 , vol 74 , no.2
When English National Opera's predecessor, Sadler's Wells Opera, gave the premiere of Britten's Peter Grimes, in June 1945, shortly after the close of World War II in Europe, it marked a new epoch in English music. So the work's return to the Coliseum stage on May 9, in a new production by David Alden, inevitably had a sense of company pride about it. There was quite a lot to be proud of.
In the pit, music director Edward Gardner delivered playing of the highest order from ENO's orchestra, while onstage the expanded chorus swept the audience along with the precision and belligerence of their contributions. Gardner sought out the many intricacies of Britten's writing and its debt on the one hand to Bergian Expressionism and on the other to the American musical. This was a riveting interpretation of a score that has lost none of its potency and striking imagination.
Alden and his designers, Paul Steinberg (sets) and Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes), chose to move the action forward from 1830 to the period of the premiere, with the chorus dressed in the dull, restricted color-range of postwar austerity, though with a couple of exceptions for the principals. Rebecca de Pont Davies's Auntie, for instance, instead of presenting the usual jolly but homespun pub landlady, was clearly a sophisticate with some of the Bohemian chic of a literary figure such as Vita Sackville-West. With its armchairs and lamp-stands, her pub took on the look of a down-at-heel provincial salon. It did not ring true. Neither did the appearance of Auntie's two "nieces," usually visualized as a couple of local tarts. Here they began as uniformed schoolgirls, clutching small teddy-bears and moving, almost like identical twins, in perfectly synchronized routines. Their subsequent reappearances featured similarly odd modes of behavior.
While the score contains a measure of Expressionism in its external storm music and in its realization of the internal storm raging within Grimes himself, the overall mode of the opera is surely entirely realistic. The complex, 1970s disco-like movements that the chorus adopted for the pub sing-along of "Old Joe has Gone Fishing" looked wildly unnatural. The bulk of Steinberg's sets failed to suggest the environment of an English fishing village at any period.
The three central roles, however, offered measures of emotional reality. Australian tenor Stuart Skelton possesses a hefty, handsome tenor that immediately places him in the alternative approach to the title role established by Jon Vickers — one that works on different lines from the English tenor tradition of Peter Pears and his followers, yet just as effectively. Bold and incisive, his singing was consistently impressive, while his acting was sufficiently skilled to make him a persuasive representative of an inadequate, emotionally stunted individual. Gerald Finley's Balstrode — dressed in a naval uniform, even though he's supposed to be a retired sea-captain — articulated the character, and in particular his words, with fine definition. Best of all was Amanda Roocroft's Ellen Orford. With her clear, resilient soprano searching out all the most meaningful corners of both text and music, Roocroft reaffirmed her position as one of Britain's leading opera singers, an actress of exceptional understanding and resource at the peak of her powers.
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All photographs by George Mott