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 BENJAMIN
BRITTEN Peter Grimes
Peter
GrimesPHILIP
LANGRIDGE English National
Opera Benjamin Britten composed one of the first operas for television, which received a moderate success d'estime, but was not in those early days persuasive that the medium had a great future; Owen Wingrave, is probably more effective on the stage, but it has never won the place of Peter Grimes in the canon of 20 C opera. There have been half a dozen or so recordings of Peter Grimes and Britten's own is, of course, a bench-mark version. This DVD is however a landmark of an importance which cannot be exaggerated, a permanent record of a great performance of Tim Alberry's production, live in 1994 transformed and enhanced by the filming so that it becomes a different and, for me, heightened experience. I saw the original ground breaking production with Peter Pears and others, notably at Glyndebourne. This ENO production too; and impressive and moving it was at London's Coliseum. Previously issued on VHS video, the DVD as seen on a modern large screen TV set takes it to a new dimension of opera at home and confirms that it was a performance in which the casting was ideal and bears close up scrutiny down to the characterisation of the minor parts. It is ensemble opera performance of the highest order. The camera work by a large team, directed for TV by Barrie Gavin, raises it to a new dimension of focused intensity and, as I felt with the Abbado/Arthaus Wozzeck, it is too draining to watch straight through without taking breaks. The lighting plays a large part in creating the atmosphere and the singers are often seen individually against dark backgrounds, their always pointful words more telling with the subtitles showing, even though they are sung with admirable clarity. But Montagu Slater's poetic text (after Crabbe) has flights of fancy and subtleties that are bound to escape the listener who does not know the libretto inside out and, with familiarity with the convention, the optional subtitles become undistracting, especially as one does not have to turn the head to read them as in the opera house - I always find that I don't know the words of even standard operas as well as I think I do and should! David Atherton draws precision and fire in his totally idiomatic conducting, with splendid sound quality, and I find this account with the ENO Orchestra of a bench-mark standard to set against Benjamin Britten's own recording. It is in a different class from the recent Stuttgart DVD of Turn of the Screw, and the filmed backgrounds to the Peter Grimes interludes provide just the right contemplative ambience for these integral elements of the whole; I should prefer them to be dropped from independent concert performance now that the opera is so firmly established and likely to continue to be revived for the foreseeable future all over the world. Philip Langridge eclipses my memory of Pears in his fully rounded picture of the outsider in the Borough on the Suffolk coast; time was when the roles created for the unique and idoiosyncratic voice of Peter Pears were unthinkable for other tenors! I shan't go into the numerous individual performances in detail here; they are each telling and memorable, as is the baleful, dominant presence of the hostile chorus of residents. which overwhelms the sympathy of the self-deluding optimist Ellen (Janice Cairns) and the more realistic Balstrode (Alan Opie). I shall return
to this DVD soon with visitors and it deserves a pride of place
in any good opera DVD collection. |