Conductor, Edward Gardner; Production, Stefan Herheim; Set Design, Silke Bauer; Costume Design, Esther Bialas; Lighting, Michael Bauer. Peter Grimes, Stuart Skelton; Ellen Orford, Rachel Willis-Sørensen; Balstrode, Iain Paterson; Auntie, Claudia Mahnke; Swallow, Brindley Sherratt; Mrs. Sedley, Jennifer Johnston; Ned Keene, Andrew Hamilton
It’s ages since I last saw Peter Grimes live on stage – I was asking myself the question of exactly when just before curtain-up, and thought maybe not since the ROHCG Vickers/Davis/Elijah Moshinsky production in the 70’s. That seems ridiculous – maybe sometime in the early 00’s with ENO? At any rate the only stage images I have aurally and visually are Vickers’ voice and the pebble beach set from that ROHCG production. I was disappointed to have missed the highly-praised ROHCG performance I’d booked to see in March because of Covid, and so was particularly excited to see that this was a production directed by Stefan Herheim, from whom I’ve seen interesting and good work, and with a good cast of stalwarts – Stuart Skelton, Iain Paterson, and indeed Brindley Sherratt, fresh from Gurnemanz (see below), as well as Ed Gardiner.
This was a very fine production and performance. The basic set is a barrel-vaulted building looking not unlike some of the older village halls in places near where I live. It opens up at the back to have a further performing space with a backdrop on which can be projected images of the sea, shoals of fish, a burning sun – there are other images as well, often with a blue theme (whereas the hall itself is brownish) . The hall is used as the main performance space so that it serves as Grimes’ hut from which the boy climbs out and falls, the church service, the pub, the Act 3 party and more. All this works very well. The ‘building’ helps the singers’ voices and makes the chorus more menacing (in fact the sound was near to eardrum-bursting levels at points) – in general terms it also conveys that sense of the confinement of village life which is a fertile breeding ground for resentment and rumour. There is little sense of the wideness of the sea and its infinite horizons – the sea is only there as a place of work and the action of the opera in this production scarcely takes it into account. There is a massive amount of work for the chorus to do, and for the director to get them to do, in the opera, as well as in the latter case handling the movements of the minor characters as well. I thought this was well done – no sense of uncomfortable blocks of people, as in Les Troyens, hanging around but, rather, feeling that everyone was a character, and knew what they were doing, and this makes the coming together of the mob more terrifying. Thus the director ensures the story is told well. Herheim gives prominence to the boy as a symbolic figure– dressed in white, and obviously conveying that sense of innocence, and the tragedy of its loss, which is a theme also in Billy Budd, the Turn of the Screw, and in a slightly different way Death in Venice. But this was not overdone or out of place – that could be said of the whole of the production: it was fully in conformity with music and text, and in no way strained that relationship (again, unlike Les Troyens!). Maybe the two occasions when the house lights came on as the chorus sung at us, seeking Grimes, and obviously implicating us in the vilification and persecution of Grimes, were a bit cliched – personally, I didn’t mind.
I do find this a very moving and remarkable work. It is both of its time, and universal. It is clearly in part the reaction of a gay man to the public vilification and criminalising of being gay, but goes beyond that to any sort of persecution of one group of people by another. It raises – tangentially – uncomfortable thoughts for me about my visit – I have dreamed for over 50 years of coming to the Munich Opera Festival. What if I had been born in 1868 rather than 1952. If again I had waited 50 years to have come to this Festival in 1938, focusing on and celebrating the performances by Furtwangler, Richard Strauss at this very opera house, how aware would I have been of the completely unacceptable political regime that lay behind it, and the persecution of Jews which was gathering pace. Would I have ignored that in the pursuit of great performances? I hope not, but it is part of the power of this work that it raises those sorts of questions in my mind.
However, a fine performance depends on the singers and musicians. All the minor roles were very well done – one of them, Ned Keene, was sung by an understudy, Andrew Hamilton, who had only been told today that the original performer for the role had Covid (he got a big cheer). The stand-out for me were:
- Iain Paterson as Bulstrode (another Wotan and Sachs!) who sang authoritatively and resonantly (reminding me of Norman Bailey in the classic Moshinsky production) and who came across sympathetically, without overdoing the old sea-dog angle.
- Rachel Willis-Sørensen as Ellen Orford, who was a revelation to me. I have always thought of Ellen as a bit of a wet blanket (poor Heather Harper may have had something to do with this) but this performer had a stunning voice (she has the Marschallin in her repertory) and made Ellen a far more real and passionate character than I had previously realised.
Stuart Skelton, I am afraid, these days, makes me nervous. After his disastrous Prize Song at the Last Night of the Proms last year, I feel uncomfortable whenever he sings a high note. To be fair, he gave us much beautiful quiet singing, in what was, for Britten, Pears’ special register, and some really powerful top notes as well, but also some cracked and tentative ones. I never really got much sense of a characterisation of Grimes from his performance either; he just looks like a big bloke wandering around the stage – and it seems now as though he moves around with some difficulty, which doesn’t really help. To be fair to him, Grimes is a pretty ambiguous character, which makes characterisation difficult, reflecting some of the conflicting impulses of his creator – an outsider who would be much happier in a city (as Bulstrode says at one point) but who decides to live close to his roots (as Grimes says) in precisely the sort of place where people would look askance at him. Vickers managed to create a characterisation of the rolet by extreme means, focusing throughout on the madness and intensity. I’d love to have seen how Pears performed the role – obviously I have the recording, which emphasises the introspective aspects of it, but I wonder how he conveyed that, how he looked and felt, on stage……
Ed Gardiner got a great performance from the orchestra – a very nuanced performance with climaxes carefully graded, and much fine playing. The chorus was superb, and really incisive in their approach..
The audience was very positive about the performance and cheered enthusiastically – it was good to see a reasonable proportion, again, of youngish people. I assume most of them were German and most of them were therefore following the German surtitles. Diction was pretty good amongst the cast but when I did look up to the English surtitles, I found a lot of the Montague Slater libretto toe-curlingly outdated, which might put a youngish UK audience off. Reginald Goodall, who conducted the first performance of Peter Grimes, is supposed to have said something like “I do think Ben is too twee and parochial. He should have had at least partially a European education – that would have knocked the tweeness out of him”
Anyway, a great evening……I have one more evening at the National Theatre, a lieder abend on Friday evening. Other than that there’s the Prinzregententheater on Sunday for Capriccio, and of course Leipzig for Parsifal on Thursday
John's musical journey 