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Owen Wingrave (DVD)
“Gerald Finley was magnificent as Owen” The Observer
"...probably the best film version of an opera yet made" The Telegraph
"Gerald Finley’s Owen offers, simply, singing of the English language as fine as any on record." Opera News
Composer: Benjamin Britten
Conductor: Kent Nagano
Director: Margaret Williams
Performers:
· Gerald Finley: Owen Wingrave
· Peter Savidge: Spencer Coyle
· Miss Wingrave: Josephine Barstow
· Lechmere: Hilton Marlton
· Mrs. Coyle: Anne Dawson
· Mrs. Julian: Elizabeth Gale
· Kate Julian: Charlotte Kant
· Sir Philip Wingrave: Martyn Hill
· Young Wingrave: Paddy Mafham
· His father: Colin Bridges
· Young Wingrave's friend: Oliver Leonard
· Butler: Clive Billing
· Housekeeper: Olive Williams
· Cadets: David Curry, Grant Doyle, Dan Jordan
· Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin
Region: Region 2
Number of discs: 1
Studio: Arthaus Musik
DVD Release Date: 24 Nov 2003. First seen on Channel 4 TV on June 28 2001
Run Time: 92 minutes
ASIN: B00008O8C2
Run Time: 92 minutes
Notes: Margaret Williams adapts Britten's 1971 opera, originally written for BBC telecast, into another film version, one that is highly successful. She artfully uses films as an effective means to display emotion and story without ever sacrificing the music. Kent Nagano leads a very fine cast in an absolutely stunning performance. Includes documentary “The Hidden Heart.”
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only)
Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
Studio: Kultur Video
DVD Release Date: February 22, 2005
ASIN: B0007CILJI
What the critics say
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer,
August 5, 2001 [extract]
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,532925,00.html
…Despite the intrepid adventures he [Britten] always took in his music, he wasn't a great one for mod cons. He owned no television when he was commissioned to write an opera for the medium. Even in 1971 that was really rather backward, though one suspects that were he alive today he might resist the temptation even more stubbornly. Channel 4 honoured his memory with a documentary, The Hidden Heart (director Teresa Griffiths) exploring Britten's love affair with Peter Pears, and a new version of Owen Wingrave directed by Margaret Williams and conducted by Kent Nagano.
Filmed on location and with some incisive camera shots (especially in the brilliantly suffocating dinner party scene), this late and often disregarded work gained new presence and authority. Gerald Finley was magnificent as Owen, the young man from a family of soldiers who hates the idea of fighting.
His pacifism is condemned by the elders, led by Dame Josephine Barstow as the terrifying Miss Wingrave. Bad composers clutch at such causes, grimly hoping their virtue will infect and uplift the music. The more gifted, such as Sally Beamish, rise with the issue to meet and match it. Only the great composer can make a universal plea out of a little family difficulty.
Gary Higginson for musicweb [extract]
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2004/May04/Britten_Wingrave.htm
…Seeing this, stunning DVD however, I am now entirely won over and I feel that the work has been much underestimated.
The libretto by Myfanwy Piper is excellent and utterly singable being based on a curious ghost story by Henry James whose ‘Turn of the Screw’ had been used by Britten well over ten years previously. Piper had been responsible for that libretto too.
The plot concerns a family of lower aristocratic stock who, for generations going back to Cromwellian times, had always fought and died when their country needed them. Owen is at military school when he realizes that this way of life is not for him and returns home to find himself ostracized by family, friends and fiancée Kate. He is a typical Britten character - the outsider within an enclosed society.
A room in the house is haunted by a vengeful ancestor and Kate wants to test Owen's true mettle by daring him to spend the night there. Owen agrees and allows himself to be locked in. The next morning Owen is found dead on the floor and Kate blames herself; the ancestor has taken his revenge. In this DVD the action is updated to the 1950s from the original Edwardian era. I find this unnecessary and not all that helpful.
There is nothing 'stagey' about the production. We are in a real live, slightly decaying, country home where the camera is free to roam inside and out. The characters were filmed singing live to camera, neatly allied to an orchestral backing track. The differences in acoustic between singing in the hall and singing outside may seem odd at first but for the most part it works. In any event you soon get used to differing echo effects. Oddly enough Britten's orchestration allows for these geo-physical alterations. The lighting can be very atmospheric especially in the scene on the upstairs landing between Owen and Kate when for a few moments they seem as if they might be reconciled.
This DVD offers a very strong cast. It is as strong as the one I saw in 1973 which also included Janet Baker as Kate, played here in a wonderfully strong and determined manner by Charlotte Hellekant. Mrs. Coyle, originally played by the much lamented Heather Harper, is sung by Anne Dawson, surely Harper’s equal. I am enormously impressed by a strongly dignified Gerald Finley as Owen, who I have not seen before. Martyn Hill is also memorable in a cameo that brings focus and a lead. Hill’s make-up, by the way, is very impressive.
I have never thought of Kent Nagano or the Deutsches Symphony Orchestra, for that matter, as Britten proponents. However Nagano’s direction is ideal. He and his orchestra demonstrate real sensitivity to this at times rather fragile music, typical of the sound-world of late Britten.
In addition to the opera there is a 57 minute Britten documentary, 'The Hidden Heart'. This concentrates on Peter Grimes, the War Requiem and Death in Venice and has interviews with those who knew Britten and Pears. The counter-tenor James Bowman famously describes the couple as ‘entirely respectable’ ... ‘Prep school masters’. Rostropovich and Galina Vishnevskaya are also interviewed. Incidentally the subtitles, which I particular needed during the Russian language interviews, were a bit tangled up. The English one came out German, the German as Spanish and the Spanish as French!
Margaret Williams takes a strongly active approach in direction with quickly moving camera angles, singers singing to themselves to reflect thought processes, voices off and other tricks. Although this might irritate some viewers it should not detract from such an excellent project which might well resuscitate the opera’s fortunes.
The Telegraph, 16 June 2001
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2001/06/16/bftr.xml
Military ghost gets a re-shoot
Henry James published his ghost story Owen Wingrave in 1893. It is the tale of the scion of a dynasty of soldiers, who dares to question the concept of militarism and refuses to follow his soldierly destiny. He is disinherited by his fire-eating grandfather, General Sir Philip Wingrave (Owen is an orphan), and is challenged by his fiercely disapproving, life-long sweetheart Kate to sleep in the haunted room.
That room contains the ghost of a Georgian Colonel Wingrave who has brutally struck and inadvertently killed his small son and shortly after himself dies of remorse. When Kate goes to "release the victim of her derision . . . Owen . . . lay dead on the spot on which his ancestor had been found. He was all the young soldier on the gained field."
One can understand why, when the BBC commissioned Benjamin Britten in 1966 to write an opera for television, he turned to James's story and to Myfanwy Piper to be his librettist. They had collaborated with notable success on another James ghost story, The Turn of the Screw in 1954. In addition, the theme of Owen Wingrave fitted perfectly Britten's deep commitment to pacifism. For him, Owen's military recusancy and sacrifice were the perfect subject.
The opera was shown by the BBC on May 16, 1971, having been recorded over a nine-day period on the stage of the Maltings at Snape, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, with Benjamin Luxon in the title role and Britten himself conducting.
As it was transmitted in more than 20 European countries and the USA, Wingrave must have reached a far larger audience than any opera composer can ever have dreamed of. This did not make Britten, already seriously ill at the time, entirely happy with the TV production. He objected so strongly to the ending that he threatened to refuse permission to broadcast (as his contract entitled him to do), unless it was re-shot.
Now Owen Wingrave is about to be on television again, in a rather different form. Premiered, suitably, at Aldeburgh on Thursday before being shown on Channel 4, this is a proper film and was shot entirely on location.
Director Margaret Williams (who had previously made TV films of Judith Weir's opera Blond Eckbert and Thomas Ades's Powder her Face) has taken advantage of the extra freedom accorded her to "open out" scenes during orchestral interludes. In effect, while being true to the music, she was able to create additional scenes which illuminated aspects of the work, such as Owen and Kate (Gerald Finley and Charlotte Hellekant) as a tender, happy couple shown in a flashback shot in the garden.
Whereas the original TV version stayed true to James's Victorian setting, the new one updates the action to 1958, two years after Suez. (Williams made the decision because of "that distance and that nearness to us - we all have some connection with the Second World War".) The eminent musicologist Donald Mitchell, the keeper of the Britten conscience in such matters and a close advisor on the film, told me the libretto had been "updated to make it meaningful to a younger audience" and that Williams had at one stage envisaged using background newsreel footage from the Gulf War, Tiananmen Square and the Falklands campaign while Owen, in voiceover, sings, "War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest . . ."
Happily, in my view, Williams realised that Britten and Piper don't need such enhancement and dropped the sequence. If the body of the action is brought forward, the "ghost story" is moved back in time. Colonel Wingrave and his son are in Cromwellian garb to suit the atmosphere of the Wingraves' crumbling mansion, Paramore. Their appearances have the authenticity of movie ghosts rather than the artificiality of staged spectres.
But if the opening out is facilitated by the movie process, the recording of the voices, so convincing when we see the film - because it is genuine and not mimed - was a horribly refined torture for cast, director and sound engineer. For economic reasons you can't keep a top conductor and a full orchestra endlessly repeating themselves for take after take over several weeks in a country house. So, after long piano rehearsals, they had Kent Nagano conduct the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester in a Berlin recording studio to produce what is in effect (although, of course the singers sang in that version), a backing track.
What I witnessed when I watched the cast at work was in fact an ultra-sophisticated form of karaoke, not with boozy nerds in a pub but with superb opera singers giving their all, time after time, as both actors and singers, until the director was happy and the sound man working in his own quarters upstairs and watching the filming on a TV monitor, could give his own separate seal of approval for flawless synchronisation. I saw several perfect scenes scrapped because the singing was infinitesimally out of synch with Nagano's orchestra - engrossing for the watcher but exhausting for the singers.
The result is probably the best film version of an opera yet made. It lays out a lucid exposition of a complex work and, with virtually every shot, illuminates both score and text. Wonderful performances are obtained from a highly talented cast. And it was all done on a budget of less than £1 million. One can only hope that Channel 4 immediately commissions a film of that other great Jamesian operatic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw.
William R Braun, Opera news, June 2005 , vol 69 , no.12
Opera on video has always been unsatisfying in one way or another. Live performances caught on tape usually give the best sense of an operatic work as an entity. But a given performance quite rightly calibrated for the paying customers in a large house — say, Kathleen Battle’s Zerbinetta — can seem brittle close-up. Some productions, such as Rhoda Levine’s Lizzie Borden, are such failures in the house that they seem cynically conceived only for a telecast, where they work well. Lip-synched films offer the worst of both worlds: if we are not getting the singer’s real performance, why not just have an actor make the film? There was a recent breakthrough with Penny Woolcock’s film of The Death of Klinghoffer, in which a sophisticated playback system allowed the singers to perform live on location, even outdoors. Margaret Williams’s Owen Wingrave is another solution, also a success. Williams has taken Britten’s opera, which was originally conceived for a 1971 BBC telecast, and seized every possible opportunity to make an internal dialogue of it. Many of Myfanwy Piper’s lines are already asides or hidden thoughts. Williams further uses reaction shots, singers in shadow and singers well back in the frame to take the focus off of whether they are really singing. It works brilliantly, because Wingrave is at heart a thoughtful examination of aspects of pacifism. Toward the end, it turns into a ghost story, not a very good one, but Williams smooths this over by giving us a few early appearances of the phantoms, kept until too late in the original.
It helps that the musical performance, under Kent Nagano, is fully as fine as Britten’s own recording, and in some casting surpasses it. Gerald Finley’s Owen offers, simply, singing of the English language as fine as any on record. His acting is perfectly adjusted to film rather than the stage; in this he is joined by Charlotte Hellekant as Kate (originally Janet Baker’s role). Hellekant shapes her character, the most unpleasant young woman in all opera, around the crucial moment of Owen’s disinheritance. Her voice, bearing and expression keenly alter as she strikes out on her own. Josephine Barstow is perfect as Owen’s imperious aunt. Only Elizabeth Gale’s Mrs. Julian acts for the theater, but she sings well. Nagano’s version of the score is fifteen minutes shorter than Britten’s, but it is neither superficial nor driven.
The opera comes with an hour-long documentary, The Hidden Heart. Britten’s status as a gay outsider is matched with Peter Grimes, his pacificism and attainment of national honors with the War Requiem, and the passing of fashion around him with Death in Venice. It’s an intensely anti-musical film, yet the archival footage, constantly interrupted, is essential viewing. A dozen of Britten’s friends and colleagues say important things, but not one of them is identified.