Peter Grimes at ENO

I’m on the road with Peter and he’s been great company so far.

My friend Sarah Noble was the one who provided me with this amazing opportunity to connect with the ENO Grimes. Sarah and I found each other on the internet many year ago now. She was one of the first people I knew to get in on the opera blog phenomenon – an early adopter like many kiwis. Sarah is a small town girl from New Zealand, like me, but she always had it together and her high level skills at writing soon garnered her a lot of attention across the world. There was no way Sarah was staying in New Zealand for long, and she has completed freelance writing for publications including Limelight magazine and Opera News. Already with an impressive portfolio, the realization of her dream to see the opera stages of the world seemed certain. And then, fate gave her a bit of a leg up – she met internationally acclaimed tenor Stuart Skelton at a concert, and the rest is history.

Sarah now splits her time between London and Florida, in a sort of operatic netherworld which consists of attending Stuart’s many glitzy debut performances, shopping, and experiencing many different timezones within the same week. I truly cannot believe how far she has come. I can still remember her attending rehearsals for my first production of The Magic Flute at school, directed by the late lamented Bernd Benthaak. Bernd was an old-fashioned German director long before regietheater (reign of the director) was born, and I admired his eye for aesthetics and his desire to maintain the purity of the text. My first production with Bernd was Orpheus in the Underworld – I can remember that he lined all the chorus girls up and picked the ones who were going to be lambs in the show. I was picked. Sounds really wrong written down like this but I had a lovely time. I still remember the dance we all had to do: little kicks, and a number with tenor James Rodgers who was playing Pluto. I had great fun on that tour. I found out later that another German director I worked with, Elke Neidhardt, passed away recently after a long illness. Vale to these controversial denizens of the theatre – I never had a problem with either of them and always found working with them a stimulating experience. But I digress.

Sarah and I haven’t spoken in years and it’s crazy to think that our friendship in New Zealand would lead to me getting a backstage pass to the ENO. Sarah’s partner Stu is playing the lead in Peter Grimes, and this was an excellent chance to compare the ON production with ENO’s efforts. The morning before I’d had the opportunity to have a lesson with Lynne Dawson at the Royal Northern College of Music to ascertain how we’d be as a fit for postgraduate studies at the college. This was enlightening for me – I got to find out a bit about how the college ticks and whether it’s the right place for me or not.

After I headed straight for London, and the Euston Square Hotel. I really like this little place, it’s modest, the continental breakfast’s set up on a bar countertop (but it’s complimentary,) the Wifi doesn’t work (but the staff are so nice about it), and you meet garrulous Scotsmen. More on this later.

This was a great place to spend my hours between Grimes. Rehearsals were from 2-6 and 7-9:30pm, so I wouldn’t have the chance to see huge amounts this trip. However I hadn’t seen this part of London much, and a really nice ticket booth operator gave me heaps of information. Euston Square Hotel was very very central. I couldn’t have been happier about that – it was such a short tube ride to Charring Cross too, where rehearsals were going on. This was a great area. All around me was history – Trafalgar Square, where even the pigeons look historic, the National Portrait Gallery… I found a charming bookshop, Waterstones, but was disappointed later to discover it was actually part of a chain. I liked seeing all the English men lined up inside the pubs, pints in hand, crowded around the TV watching the rugby. I didn’t know this sort of fraternalism still existed in British pubs, there’s something so English about it and I’m glad you can still find it. There was a great shop selling hats just up the road which looked well frequented, and a tasty looking burrito place.

I found my way to the stage door and met Nicole, the company manager who shared with me how she got into this game. She had a degree in Russian which I found fascinating, and we chatted a little about how the market had changed since the iron curtain had gone back up. Singers from Eastern Europe could now travel of course, and as they were so well equipped for the task of singing and took lower pay that’s bad news for Westerners looking for work. But this isn’t a new phenomenon. The ENO used to tour to Russia all the time, and of course this was a huge novelty during the cold war but now redundant - Russia has well and truly won the opera space race. I was given a backstage pass and Nicole showed me around the twists and turns of this beautiful Victorian building to bring me to the dress circle. It was almost as narrow and confined as the back blocks of Opera North, but with a hint more Southern grandeur and a hint less bricks and mortar. I was able to get my first taste of the production from this vantage point.

This first thing I noticed was the similarities of these Victorian era theatres. The space seemed really very comparable to the Grand, but I was told that this is an illusion. While spatially speaking I was correct, in terms of dimensions the coliseum had much more depth. This meant that to fill it with sound was a real mission in itself for the singer.

I noted straight away that our Ellen Orford had a way of doing this without pushing the voice beyond natural limits. Elza had developed this way of turning the voice above the passagio and there was a real blade on the sound. This gave her sound an almost ethereal beauty. It drifted with a mix of pliability and dynamism over the orchestra, always warm and genuine, and authentic. I liked how Elza brought the audience into the onstage world gradually.

It was my first time hearing Sarah’s Stu live, and he did not disappoint. Such an authoritative sound, to match his physicality. This was the Grimes I had been waiting for in anticipation – I had not really experienced the interpretative resonance I was hoping for at the recent Opera North production. Stuart possesses a heldentenor of electric possibility, and he’s in complete command of the instrument. You wonder where he is going to take it at each turn. He embraces the score with heroic abandon. Finally a Grimes with physical and vocal presence -  Stuart has been listed in the tradition of Jon Vickers, who revitalized the interpretation of Grimes after Peter Pears and Phillip Langridge as an almost inhuman force whose violent tendencies come from his elemental nature. Stuart suggested to me even that Grimes emerged fully formed washed up on the beach rather than being born of man.

Even today it’s really open to interpretation about Grimes’ predominant nature, but I’ve always seen him as Stuart does rather than a gentle misunderstood soul of the English tradition. Also whether Grimes’ violence is intentionally malicious or an elemental force of his nature is open to interpretation. I got to discuss this with Stuart.

The nieces, Swallow, and all the townspeople in this production are like Tim Burton creations. They wandered around with dead-eyed expressions or Tim Curryish grins. Their arms waved robotically. There were some exaggeratedly expressionist elements of the physical action which didn't always make sense but this is splitting hairs. 

Creepier still, the nieces in this production of Grimes are young school girls – making the whole overtone of the production and the fact these girls are the embodiment of the collective idiosyncracies of the town even more alarming. They have absorbed and suffered through unimaginable small town horrors in their young lives, been passed around from man to man. We don’t know if the nieces are even related to ‘aunty’, who owns the town brothel, but their age and occupation would be inexcusable even if was outside of the family.

By way of comparison, here were my immediate observations from the Opera North production of Grimes:

I was fortunate enough tonight to experience the final performance of Grimes at the Grand Theatre in Leeds.

I was also in attendance with the pre-show discussion which introduced me to several new points about Benjamin Britten. For example his father was extremely strict in regards to the outside influences Britten was introduced to, going as far as to ban all records and gramophones from the house and only allowing live music. Britten was also taught by John Ireland at the RCM, but his real cultural revolution arose when he met Frank Bridge who introduced him to wider possibilities and colours in his musical framework, including the compositional style of Shostakovich.

Britten came to terms with his professional and personal identity through the literary works of W.H Auden.

Reading the poem Peter Grimes, Britten realised two things: A) he needed to return to England and B) he wanted to write an opera based on this polarising yet affecting protagonist.

Having experienced the opera tonight I can honestly say that it is a deeply personal work which affects the listener in many different ways.

Grimes is a ticking emotional timebomb with a slow release detonation that packs a powerful emotional punch. Britten composed this opera with deliberate ambiguity, and there is no doubt that while that makes it one of his most compelling works it also makes it one of the most impenetrable.

It is interesting to observe how the space was used in the theatre. For example, the chorus almost WAS the set for this production, filling in for the ocean and the sails of a sea ship. The chorus played an absolutely integral part to the action of the scenes.

It is interesting to think about the use of the stage and the minimalist set in terms of Opera North’s modus operandi and also budgetary projections. This is Britten’s season and as we are aware that carries with it certain box office constraints and restrictions as Britten, like Peter Grimes, tends to polarise people. So with the minimalism inherent in a touring production like this one, sometimes you do miss the full effects of the atmosphere of a small seaside village. However, the sea air was there in the movement and characterisation of the wonderful chorus, each who took on characters that carried real life. They brought truth and sharp perspective to this show. They created a scene so rich and vibrant we could believe it to be taken straight out of the pages of our everyday world.

Little details like the coats worn, the procession of people walking to church, and just small actions made these chorus scenes particularly believable. There is no opera that calls on the chorus’ resources more.

The character of Ellen Orford has been accused of complicity when it comes to Peter Grimes. Is she an enabler to his actions? Along the same lines as this, is Grimes a monster or simply a misunderstood and alienated lost soul? Did he cause the death of his first apprentice? We consider this a key question, but Britten clearly does not. He does not concern himself with the apparent culpability or non-culpability of Grimes, but rather reminds us that to err is human. Good and bad in the world does not exist on a black and white spectrum, and that includes the unfortunate Grimes.

Sometimes we all feel like things are spinning from beyond our grasp – there are various moments where we see the world from Grimes’ perspective, and it feels as if the world is a maze with directions everyone else has been given. When Britten shows us the world as it should be with Grimes in it, and then the reality, we feel the pain keenly. Grimes is trapped in a world he never made. Yet, he cannot escape his fate. He continues to ask the question: “Who can turn clouds back and begin again?”

This essential question was not always captured by the Peter Grimes of our production. Physically endowed with all the attributes for this role, he did not always have the emotional presence needed for a Grimes and consequently his soliloquys and predicament did not reach as far to the heart as one would have hoped.