Peter Grimes

by Benjamin Britten

seen a the Royal Festival Hall on 30 November 2019

Edward Gardner conducted the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, with additional choirs, and with Stuart Skelton as Peter Grimes, Erin Wall as Ellen Orford and Roderick Williams as Captain Balstrode, in a semi-staged performance of Britten's great opera. The choir and soloists were not exactly in costume, but not formally dressed either; the men looked more homespun than the women. The soloists performed in front of the orchestra, in a line which made inter-action minimal, with a few barrels as props.

This meant that the music was the focus above all, and the result was splendidly powerful. The large choral presence made for an overwhelming town of gossips when their blood was up, and yet at times they sang with rapt quietness. The Sunday service in Act Three was particularly effective as everyone turned their backs on the audience and followed an associate conductor standing beside the organist. This muted the acoustic, emulated a church service, and showed in the starkest visual form how the township could be deliberately unaware of what was happening to the major characters. The terrifying result, of course, is that the townspeople, thinking themselves so morally superior, could leap to the worst conclusions when judging someone already seeming to be an outcast.

In the meantime the soloists performed really well, at times battling the strength of the orchestra behind them, a tougher task than dealing with players in an opera house's orchestra pit. Stuart Skelton was perhaps straining at times. One of my neighbours reported to me in the first interval that she had heard from a bartender that the singer had a cold, which, if true, means that he performed heroically. The orchestra, in its turn, was able to show its consummate skill interpreting Bitten's music under the assured direction of Edward Gardner, a conductor very familiar with operas in general and with Britten in particular, who had an enormous impact on the ENO during his time there from 2006 to 2015. 

The difficult story of a cantankerous fisherman, in many ways very unsympathetic, who may or may not have abused his apprentices, was rendered intensely human in this performance. Grimes's dogged contempt for the town, mixed with his determination to prove himself against them and the elements, leads to disaster, with yet another apprentice perishing. But Stuart Skelton conveyed not only the man's temper but his crippling insecurity and even shyness - he fumbled all gestures of possible affection towards Ellen Orford, and his whole posture was that of a man fundamentally ill-at-ease with himself as much as with the world. His final departure was the most poignant I have witnessed in the various productions I've seen in the past, as he tottered up the aisle steps n the auditorium on his final journey out to sea.

Even without full staging, this was an unbeatable demonstration of Britten's genius in rendering the lives of ordinary folk in operatic terms.