Name: Peter Grimes
Start: 2008-06-06T00:00:00.000Z
End: 2008-06-07T00:00:00.000Z
Location: Goldsmiths Great Hall

Organization

Tenor

Mario Sofroniou

Peter Grimes

Soprano

Abigail Sudbury

Ellen Orford

Contralto

Jennifer Hunt

Auntie

Nathalie Chalkley

Niece I

Casey Evans

Niece II

Baritone

Hamish Gallie

Balstrode

Mezzo-soprano

Charlotte King

Mrs (Nabob) Sedley

Bass

Daniel Rudge

Swallow

Ryan Webber

Ned Keene

Rob Ainsley

Bob Boles

Will Smith

Rev. Horace Adams

Jonathan Crowhurst

Hobson

Ross Michalski

Silent

Emily Eason

Grime's apprentice

Jamie Commans

Dr Crabbe

Singer

Gwennan Jones

Fisherwomen

Ruth Mariner

Conductor

Tim Hooper

Lighting designer

Stewart Crosbie

Librettist

Montagu Slater

Sound designer

Mariano Nuñez West

Rick Campion

Caroline Duffy

Chorus singers

Anna Kompaniets

Laura Maidmont

Natasha Elliot

Rosalyn Topping

Opera Gold

anglès

London

United Kingdom

Goldsmiths Great Hall

Peter Grimes Britten

Public

Approved

Peter Grimes was premiered in 1945 at Sadlers Wells to instant success. Bus conductors would shout out “Next stop, Peter Grimes, the murdering fisherman!” as they approached the theatre. To audiences looking to rebuild a country whose bricks and mortar, but not whose spirit, had been devastated by war, here was something artistic to celebrate: a new work in English, about England, by an Englishman, with a totally English look-and-feel. It marked a new start for English opera, which had been comatose since the baroque gems of Henry Purcell nearly 300 years previously. Handel had enjoyed huge success in the 1700s, but he was a German writing in an Italianate style; the swamping of home-grown talent by glitzy international stars just here for the money is not a problem invented by Premiership football. But Grimes established Britten as a major international talent, and is performed regularly throughout the world.

A world that will have many of its preconceptions about the English resolutely confirmed by the opera. You will search the score in vain for declarations of romantic love, outbursts of passion, or hints of decent food. But you will find rich evocations of village pubs, humour, seafaring, the language, the legal system, innate conservatism, and that mix of politeness and violence. Perhaps only tea is missing.

Its genius is more than mere nationalist ingredients. Britten’s opera is a composing tour de force incorporating all the classic opera ingredients: recitatives, solos, duos, trios, choruses, offstage religious chorus, military march, a dance, a drinking session, a mad scene and so on. There are nods to English folk song, such as in the villagers’ opening and closing choruses, or Hobson’s rustic lament about going from pub to pub. The opening court scene is a chopped-up sea-shanty. There’s even what sounds like a public-information film soundtrack (‘Fool to let it come to this’).

Grimes is as short on luscious romantic melodies as the Suffolk coast is on edelweiss. Little Rodgers’n’Hammerstein-style technicolour here: Britain’s eastern shore, gnawed at by North Sea storms, its bleak villages shrouded in mist, sits out most of the year in damp tones of grey. Britten – born in Lowestoft – knew these colours and moods well, and much of the music stunningly evokes the clammy terror and fogbound claustrophobia of dirt-poor village life-on-the-edge. Indeed, four orchestral interludes have become a concert item in their own right.

But there is great beauty here too. Ellen Orford, the Borough’s only voice of compassion, sings soothing, shapely descending lines – listen to the way she calms down the mob when offering to go with Hobson to collect the boy in Act I. Characterisation in the music is rich and vivid everywhere. Old fusspot Mrs Sedley is repetitive and nagging; officious Swallow sings pompous tunes; Hobson has a folksy simplicity; soapboxer Boles quivers and rants high up; Balstrode has strong, reliable melodies; the Nieces simper and whine in girly tandem; Rev Adams quavers effetely; Auntie robustly commands; Ned Keene has a music-hall nod-and-wink.

And there’s Grimes himself. As befits a man outside in every sense, his music rarely connects with the rest. In the courtroom at the start he ignores Swallow’s set pace and melody, and goes at his own speed on a different harmonic path. When he stumbles into the pub near the end of Act I he’s rhapsodising to himself like a man possessed about stars and fate and the universe, and though he tries to sing along with the crowd in ‘Old Joe has gone fishing’, he can only shout disjointedly over them. In the heart-rending soliloquy at the end, fragments of earlier music come back. All the while his name is chanted fatefully by the offstage chorus, echoing the ominous summons of the opera’s first words.

Whatever Englishness is, it has changed radically since 1972, never mind 1942, while rural 1830 is a lost world. But a powerful core remains. Peter Grimes, once an expression of that Englishness, has become part of that core.

English

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