Peter Grimes review – WNO’s production of Britten’s masterwork seethes like a wild and cruel sea
Wales Millennium Centre, CardiffWelsh National Opera’s production brilliantly captured the tortured guilt, small-minded bitching and flash-points of volatilityFor Welsh National Opera to match the success of the award-winning and visually stunning Death in Venice with their new Peter Grimes was always going to be difficult. But, musically, this compelling performance of the composer’s masterwork, premiered in 1945, showed the company in the strongest possible form. Britten’s conjuring both of the power of the sea and the symbiotic but fragile relationship with the fishing community it sustains is still unsurpassed and music director Tomáš Hanus brought a real integrity to his reading of the score: detailed, passionate, and ensuring that the various orchestral interludes – so familiar from the concert hall – were part of an organically cohesive whole, the Passagalia, with the plaintive solo viola, at its core.In adapting George Crabbe’s 1810 narrative poem, Britten, under partner Peter Pears’s guidance had already softened the unruly ruffian that was Crabbe’s Grimes, and tenor Nicky Spence, debuting in the title role, made him a far more sympathetic individual again. Misunderstood and something of a misfit, contemptuous of the parochial small-minded bitching of the Borough villagers and their assumption of his criminal culpability, Grimes’s hopes of redeeming himself through marriage to the widowed schoolteacher Ellen Orford seemed credible; their relationship, such as it is, was given a tenderness, hinting at intimacy, with his tortured guilt at the death of his apprentice all the more poignant, pointing up the flash-points of volatility and then the moments of madness. Against a bare set – four harbour capstans defining the front of stage, lighting capturing the moody grey of the East Anglian coast, with a single boat suspended above the action, black as doom – the chorus’s portrayal of the villagers’ fierce prejudice against Grimes and the mob mentality, baying for blood, had all the seething force of a wild and cruel sea. The personalities of the various villagers implicated in the whole vendetta were all equally vividly drawn and sung. Continue reading...
