Britten - Peter Grimes

ONP Garnier, Wednesday February 1 2023

Conductor: Alexander Soddy. Production: Deborah Warner. Sets: Michael Levine. Costumes: Luis F. Carvalho. Lighting: Peter Mumford. Videos: Justin Nardella. Peter Grimes: Allan Clayton. Ellen Orford: Maria Bengtsson. Captain Balstrode: Simon Keenlyside. Auntie: Catherine Wyn-Rogers. First Niece: Anne-Sophie Neher. Second Niece: Ilanah Lobel-Torres. Bob Boles: John Graham-Hall. Swallow: Clive Bayley. Mrs Sedley: Rosie Aldridge. Reverend Horace Adams: James Gilchrist. Ned Keene: Jacques Imbrailo. Hobson: Stephen Richardson. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos: Vincent Pontet, ONP

After a long break over Christmas and the New Year, at the farthest southwestern tip of Wales (relevant later), I now find myself back in Paris with three operas in quick succession, starting with Peter Grimes. The last time I saw anything by Britten at the Paris Opera was nearly 20 years ago. That was the late Graham Vick’s unforgettable production of… Peter Grimes. Programming at the ONP is as puzzling as its policy (if such it be) on replacing existing productions, or its decisions to show, e.g., Les Indes Galantes at the Bastille and Grimes at Garnier. But any Britten is better than none, and if at Garnier, rather than in the Bastille barn, tant mieux: I’m more bemused by it than actually bothered.

Deborah Warner’s production, though less striking, to me, than Vick’s, is a handsome, intelligent, well-directed one, with virtuoso crowd movements and fights, detailed individual characterizations and carefully-designed, crisp, ‘caravaggesque’ lighting. Set in the present day and contemporary streetwear (as, too, was Vick’s: decidedly so), it’s fairly straightforward and relatively free of directorial gimmickry. The basic space is the open stage, with ranks of spotlights on either side, and a giant backdrop recalling closed venetian blinds that, in the changing light, quite effectively, if abstractly, evokes a broad expanse of sea. The acts and interludes are marked by pale, horizontal projections on a curtain, something like moving Rothkos. As the audience files in, a boat is suspended in the empty space. There's no 'crowner's court': the inquest is more like a manhunt, with villagers carrying flashlights, taking place in Grimes's fevered dreams - or nightmares. He's haunted, from the beginning to the very end, by undeniably poetic visions of a drowning figure - a dancer or acrobat in yellow oilskins performing free-flowing arabesques on wires: his dead apprentice (but, as in this production - incongruously in the contemporary update - the apprentice is a child, the dancer's too mature for that), or a premontion of his own death by drowning (in which case the dancer's too young and lithe)?

 

Michael Levine's successive sets successfully reproduce on stage the damp, dreary decay of Britain's now-forlorn seafaring villages, with their Victorian shop-fronts boarded up as people shop out-of-town at Tesco, TK-Maxx and Wilko, the tacky, tobacco-stained wallpaper of their pubs, the ugly, dishevelled clutter of plastic crates, polystyrene boxes, tangled nets, sunbleached buoys and broken-down boats on their seafronts... and cleverly recycles those boarded-up façades, set back at an angle, as Grimes's hut. Though remotest Pembrokeshire is about as far from Suffolk as UK geography allows, it felt strange, just back from six whole weeks there, some of them grim, to be confronted again, in the gilt of Garnier and under Chagall's dreamlike dome, with the depressed, distressed universe we'd left behind. We even had a 'bitch of a gale' (the lobsters I ordered to see in the New Year could only be delivered over a week later: the boats couldn't go out), and Grimes, with his wild hair, tarry yellow oilskins, stubby boots and grubby (or grimy, I guess) teeshirt, might have been my own brother-in law, back from a day's work at sea - though he isn't, I'm glad to say, quite as off-his-rocker as Britten's fisherman.

As I mentioned above, Grimes is haunted throughout by a 'flying' or drowning aerial youth. The very last image in the opera was of this poetic vision coming gently to land and collapsing softly on the stage: a striking, moving point final, bookmarking the staging nicely.

The production was excellently cast, with unusually strong singers in the supporting roles - no tremulous, hooting parson or preacher or chesty, wobbly Mrs Sedley - a lively, cheeky, athletic Ned Keene and a gorgeous (as it should be) quartet 'from the gutter'. Among the principles, the outstanding Allan Clayton is a magnificent, complex, Grimes, more lyric than 'Helden' (so, better in Grimes's lunar musings than his occasional angry outbursts). His comparative youth brings touching vulnerability to the strange, tortured character. Simon Keenlyside is, I think it goes without saying, a great Balstrode: rock solid, beautifully phrased. And I really liked what I heard of Maria Bengtsson, a convincing actress with a distinctive timbre. But there's the rub. In the press, I've read of the 'finesse' of Alexander Soddy's conducting. But to me it seemed loud, coarse and insensitive, rarely below forte (OK, at a pinch, mf, and I admit he did quieten down at last for Peter's tragic parting scene with Ellen and Balstrode), covering both Ellen and Auntie, and he appeared inattentive both to the singers' needs and the balance between stage and pit. I was, of course, behind him, not in front (in what are supposed to be the best seats in the house, on the 'balcon', so in theory I wasn't just the victim of acoustic anomalies), but I didn't see him giving many cues, even to the chorus in their complicated, notoriously tricky counterpoint passages. He seemed more often to have his head down in the score, focused on the orchestra. And, to me, he took passages - frequent in Britten - where an ongoing orchestral accompaniment underlies a tapestry of 'random' crowd talk, too slowly, so the chatter lacked flow and sounded disjointed.

But evidently the orchestra liked him: they applauded vigorously when he took his bows. The press did too, on the whole. So probably I'm wrong as usual. And on video, the engineers will iron out any imbalances, so this should be one worth watching. Perhaps, as it isn't actually a brand new production, it's already available. I haven't checked.