Among the annual pleasures of father’s day - or faither’s day, as my daughters prefer to call it - I have received a bottle of one of my favourite white burgundies, good French and Italian cheese, some specialist chocolate, a jumper and two unexpected items. From my wife came a black linen cap, bought in Marks and Spencer, which I have been wearing indoors and out, like a rustic Italian or an old-fashioned journalist with an eye shield; and from my son a recently issued and fascinating DVD of Britten’s Peter Grimes, filmed at the Zurich Opera, a handsome, intimately scaled auditorium under the conductorship of Franz Welser-Most, whom Private Eye once nicknamed Worse Than Most but who is now becoming conspicuously Better Than Some.
Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory. The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.
Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.
The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it. But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots. The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016
Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory. The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.
For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.
Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.
The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it. But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots. The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016
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