Peter Grimes (again)

The ENO have started doing cinema relays, hurrah!  So this afternoon I got to see their production of "Peter Grimes" - at the Curzon in Richmond.  Much easier to get to and get home from.  



"Peter Grimes" is the story of an outsider, a difficult man with no respect for his social "betters", nor for the class system and other niceties like that, and a vicious temper which he battles to control, often unsuccessfully.  He's also a dreamer, with visions of a better life, of love offering him hope, and more wildly, of the stars drawing his destiny up from the sea's depths, and Davy Jones calling him home.

He's a fisherman, in a small Suffolk town modelled on Aldeburgh; the local community is close-knit, and mistrustful of those who stand a little apart.  When Grimes' young apprentice dies at sea, gossip begins to spread that he caused the boy's death.  He didn't; but gossip, as is its wont, has no interest in the truth.  When his second apprentice is killed in a horrible accident, the hostility of the locals becomes open anger.  Hounded by a mob and tortured by his own sense of guilt, Grimes breaks down and drowns himself. 

I think part of what Britten was trying to articulate was the ease with which a blinkered but relatively normal community can become a mob baying for the blood of outsiders.  As a gay man and a pacifist he knew plenty about being an outsider, after all; and by 1945 when "Peter Grimes" was premiered, the world in general had seem some truly horrifying examples of how easily a mob mentality can develop, and just what the scapegoating of those who don’t fit in can lead to.

My biggest beef with this production, which I've seen before and was cross about then, too, is that it turns all the assorted minor characters of the town into grotesques, either vile or comical.  This makes it terribly, seductively easy for the audience to distance themselves from the scenes on stage.  

At the second interval a woman behind me was exclaiming in cultured tones to her companions "Oh, those horrible, horrible people!"  

But part of what Britten is trying to remind us of, in my opinion at least, is that these "horrible people" are all of us.  Every mob that ever lived was composed of ordinary people like you and me - not of some extra layer of society that normally lives hidden under the rug.  It’s a nasty thought, but one we do need to remember.

Oh well; if you ignore the director's ideas, and concentrate on the music, you got a performance to knock your socks off.  The orchestra at ENO are superb and Britten’s wonderful score came bursting out of the cinema sound system with the force of hurricanes and tidal waves.  The huge choral shouts of “Peter Grimes!  Grimes!” at the end of Act 3 scene 1 were heart-stopping.  All the smaller roles were superbly sung, and the three principals were magnificent.

I’ve raved about Stuart Skelton before; this is the third time I’ve seen him singing this role, and he remains unbeatable.  Each time I hear him in action I fall in love with his glorious voice all over again.  It’s huge, yet he can control it down to the smallest pianissimo.  It’s seamlessly, goldenly beautiful, yet he’s not afraid to let it crack and grow momentarily raw with feeling, to use that fractional ugliness to shattering dramatic effect.  He can act; his Grimes is a towering, tragic figure and his agony at the death of the boy John is painful to watch.  He creates a figure of elemental stature, yet also one of pathetically human vulnerability; one suddenly starts to imagine what this man’s own childhood must have been like, to leave him like this.

He’s matched, this time, by a radiant Ellen Orford from Elza Van Den Heever, who sounds like an angel, acts like a RADA graduate, and can actually cry and sing (I didn’t know that was physically possible!).  And another of my favourite singers, the lovely Iain Paterson, was a tremendous Captain Balstrode.  One of the things I liked about the production was the way it clarifies their individual tragedies too; Ellen becomes a lonely war widow who in falling in love again has also unconsciously succumbed to the urge to “fix” a damaged man, and Balstrode a crippled naval veteran trying to cope with civilian life and almost-constant pain, and trying to adjust to his disability without himself becoming another outsider.  The inference that by the end of the story he is also unrequitedly in love with Ellen just makes the whole thing even more pulverising.

Ms Van Den Heever, incidentally, must be a big lass; it only took a relatively low pair of heels to make her as tall as Skelton and Paterson, who are both decidedly big fellas.  She’s slim and good-looking, but heavens, she must be a good five foot ten, if not more!  Hurrah for tall women getting to play the heroine!

So I’m pretty shattered, tonight, but it’s a good kind of shattered.  And despite my disagreements with the production, I’m thrilled that more people will have been able to discover the marvel that is Stuart Skelton; and perhaps some of them, the marvel that is Britten’s music, too.

I hope too that ENO had the good sense to record this for Dvd…

Immies for last year

I realise with embarrassment that I never got round to doing my personal arts awards for last year.  Oops.  Not as though anyone is likely to have been waiting for them, but still!  It's the awards time of year, and here are mine.  I can't give you a parade of evening-dressed stars shivering in the rain, but that's probably just as well, for them if not for me.

So: here are the winners of the Immies for 2012.

Performances of the year:

Concert: Britten “War Requiem”; Philharmonia Orchestra under Lorin Maazel, in the Festival Hall back in March.  I don’t always like Maazel’s conducting, he often strikes me as terribly cool and measured, but with the War Requiem to play with, and my favourite orchestra and chorus, and a top-notch trio of soloists, he really got fired up and let rip, and the result was a truly fabulous performance.  Especial honours to brilliant Mark Padmore (still having trouble believing this chap was at school with my brother Steve), the heart-rending tenor soloist.  

Operas:  “Der Rosenkavalier”, ENO at the Coliseum.  “Peter Grimes”, ENO at the Proms.  Impossible to slip a sheet of paper between these two for quality of performance; conducting, playing and cast were all first class.  It was fascinating to see how the ENO “Peter Grimes” actually got even better when done as a concert performance rather than a fully-staged production – a real indicator of the strength of the performances and the commitment of all concerned.

Stage play: Nick Payne “Constellations” at the Duke of York’s Theatre.  An extraordinary piece of work; funny, moving and deeply thought-provoking – and a tour de force for the cast.

Exhibition: David Hockney at the Royal Academy.  Marvellous, inspirational stuff.

Dance: The Royal Ballet revivals of Ashton’s “The Dream” and “A Month in the Country” and Wayne McGregor’s “Infra”.  Such a total contrast that I cannot pick between them.

Performers of the year:

Opera: Stuart Skelton in the ENO “Peter Grimes” prom, see above; Otto Maidi in the Cape Town Opera production of “Porgy and Bess”.

Stage: Rafe Spall in “Constellations” – an object lesson in how to make a thoroughly ordinary guy into a credible romantic hero.

Dance: Zenaida Yanowsky in “A Month in the Country”.  Luxuriously gorgeous in her abandonment, in duets with first Gary Avis and then Rupert Pennefather, and heart-breaking in her final moments of desolation.  She was also a superb Odette/Odile in “Swan Lake” in the autumn; no mere princess here but a true Swan Queen, regal, mythic and tragic.

Science 2, opera nil

Last night; Natural History Museum Annual Science Lecture by Professor Sir Martin Rees.

Wednesday night; Late night opening at the Science Museum.

Tuesday night; Calixto Bieto’s “Carmen” at the ENO.

Hmm.

It isn’t fair of me to say “Opera nil”, actually, as it was a reasonably competent performance.  But it wasn’t much more than that (except when one particular singer was on stage - more of that anon!). 

Calixto Bieto has this reputation as a shocker and a bit of a sex-orgy-man, but there was relatively little shock and almost no simulated sexual behaviour to be seen; we got one male nude, dancing about slightly feyly, and some fake fellatio, tastefully obscured behind a parked car (it’s a modern dress production, in case you’re thinking “Cars? - in nineteenth century Seville?”).  But the real  problem was that, all matters of taste aside, it was basically rather an uninspired production, and way, way too bl**dy busy.

Busy-ness on stage is becoming a bit of a bugbear of mine, I have to admit.  There was so much charging around, waving of arms and brandishing of stuff and rushing hither and thither; it was confusing and irritating.  I don’t want the music to be drowned by forty extras running about and stamping arrhythmically in army boots.  I don’t want to have masses of distracting background activity.  I don’t want bizarre things happening on stage, at least not if they are pointless things that mean nothing.  If they have a point, I’ll give them fair consideration on their merits.  But if they are completely extraneous and incoherent, they just piss me off. 

Why, for example, in this production, do the gypsy smugglers put their child to bed on the bonnet of their car, and not on one of the seats as anyone sane would do? And why do they push their car everywhere?  There’s already been a car driven across the stage by that point, and plenty of raucous noise, at times covering the music entirely.  So it can’t be because the engine doesn’t work, since it clearly does, and it can’t be because the engine will drown the music, since clearly no-one in the production team cares.  So why?  It doesn’t clarify or illuminate the action, or create a startling visual metaphor, or anything; it just looks stupid. 

There is one great moment; just at the point when I was beginning to give up hope of a single fresh idea, the huge bull silhouette of the iconic Osborne’s Sherry hoarding that had dominated the set for Act 3 was suddenly thrown down and dismembered by a team of cheerful workmen during the introduction to Act 4.  As a metaphor both for the coming bullfight and the coming destruction of Carmen herself, this was a fabulously effective bit of staging; simple, dramatic, clear, striking – everything the rest of the production, frankly, had not been.

On the plus side, the orchestra played their socks off; one would never have thought this was some of the most clichéd music on the planet, it sounded so fresh and potent.  On the singing side, things were patchier.  Ruxandra Donose sounded good (I like a Carmen with a nice deep growl), but isn’t much of an actress, and wasn’t helped by a production that saw Carmen as completely two-dimensional.  The Don José shouted a lot, and I’m afraid the Escamillo wasn’t terribly exciting either. 

Anyway, I can’t really complain, since the only real reason I had gone was to hear Elizabeth Llewellyn in action again, and she at least did not disappoint.  Oh boy, did she not disappoint! 

The more I hear of her, the more convinced I am that she is on her way to being one of the great singers of our time.  A lot of Micaëlas go all out for the “unworldly-innocent-girl” thing, and end up acting dumb and sounding bland.  Miss Llewellyn’s singing has enough heft and plangency to make Micaëla sound like a real, three-dimensional, thinking person, yet also has the unerring sweetness that is so vital for the character.  There’s no discernible break in her voice, she soars into the top notes as if they were the easiest thing in the world, she is both lyrical and dramatic, and the timbre of her voice makes the hairs on the back of my neck prickle up.  And she’s beautiful, and she can act.  The perfect package.

But the production overall just didn’t have anything much to offer me.  It wasn’t shocking, except for being shockingly unexciting.  Each time Miss Llewellyn came on, the whole thing went through the roof – she has the same kind of absolutely committed engagement on stage as Simon Keenlyside or Sarah Connolly, so that one is simply riveted to her from the moment she appears.  But Micaëla isn’t around very much, and the rest of the time I’m afraid it was all basically rather dull.

Which the science events were not.

Wednesday, I went along to the Science Museum Late largely to support the Dipgeek, who was one of the semi-finalists in a kind of public-speaking rally for wannabe science communicators.  To my indignation, she was only the runner-up, despite being easily the best speaker.  I don’t say that just because I’m prejudiced in favour of my friends, by the way (although obviously I am!).  The winner was a scarily bubbly lass who gave a terribly jokey talk that was clearly aimed at kids – to an adult audience.  I guess I don’t like being talked down to, even when the talk is about something I know b*gger-all about (stem cell research, in this case).  Anyway, as far as I can understand it this means the Dipgeek may yet make it to the final, which is in April and clashes with a concert featuring Nikolai Lugansky playing Tchaikovsky 1 at the Festival Hall.  Aargh!  Support friend, or support Lugansky?  Friend or pianohunk?  For that matter, friend, or Tchaikovsky at his most passionate and dramatic?  Aargh...

The rest of Wednesday evening I mooched in the Science Museum, enjoying the late-night party atmosphere; had a glass of shiraz, amused myself playing with all the push-the-button, watch-it-explode hands-on stuff one normally can’t get near for screaming kids, and went on the Apollo Launch simulator thingy, which turned out to be at one and the same time both slightly cheesy and one of the most exhilarating things I’ve done in ages.

Last night I met Jane for a pre-birthday treat of a crêpe and a lecture on cosmology.  Professor Sir Martin Rees looks like an elderly sparrowhawk and is a terrific speaker who can make the most mind-boggling stuff sound comprehensible, even to a total layperson like me.  He’s the Astronomer Royal (I didn’t know we still had one!) and as science communicators go I don’t think they get better than this.   I haven’t a hope of summing up his talk, but it was witty, fascinating and thought-provoking, and illustrated with some excellent slides - images from the Hubble Space Telescope, computer simulations of galaxies crashing into one another and so on. 

Today I had a fairly busy day at work, and this evening I am doing my packing, eating one of those slightly-odd “use everything up” suppers, and trying to get a couple of hours’ sleep before getting up in the wee small hours to take a night bus to Victoria Station, and a night train to Gatwick Airport, and my flight to Paphos and the joys of brandy sours and good Cypriot food, fresh sea air, and hopefully some sunshine on my birthday... 

First opera of the autumn season

I thought you might like a review of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, which I saw at the Coliseum on Monday night.  Basically, if you missed it, you didn’t miss much! 

That’s not really fair of me.  The cast was excellent, especially Roland Wood and Benedict Nelson, and they were all singing their hearts out.  The orchestra were playing their socks off.  The music was lovely, though it didn’t leave me with any particular moments that stay in my head musically, much less coming out humming the big tunes. It was just slow, lusciously melodic Vaughan Williams-y stuff; it rolled beautifully on, but never really got anywhere.

But there were some big buts; it was very long and terribly slow and the production was a bit confused.

The staging looked great; fabulous set design and lighting, with moving grey walls suddenly bathed in blazes of richly textured colour, and amazing puppetry for the giant figure of Apollyon, and the costumes for Vanity Fair were brilliant.  The whole thing looked as though it had been designed by a team of Mark Rothko and Anselm Kiefer for the sets and Georg Grosz for the costumes.  But the story had been re-imagined as a man dreaming about his last days on death row before going to the electric chair, and that just didn’t really work.

I gave it a chance; I gave it 3 hours’ worth of chance, but I still wasn’t convinced by the end.

I didn’t mind it going into modern dress, especially as it was pretty non-specific modern dress.  John Bunyan became a kind of generic political prisoner in a prison camp or gulag that could have been anywhere and anytime in the last century or so.  It could have been Siberia or Robben Island or Reading Gaol.  That seemed reasonable to me; after all, Amnesty International is dealing with the present-day equivalents of Bunyan, wherever they work.  But then it all got a bit confused. 

Initially all the other characters (except Apollyon, who was a marvellous fifteen foot tall rod puppet) were portrayed by the other prisoners quickly putting on white scarves or black gloves or something, to indicate they were now appearing as someone else.  The result was that at first it looked as though we were meant to imagine they were enacting the story for the lead character’s consolation as he faced his approaching execution.  But the Evangelist was a slightly comical-looking Lowry-type figure with a raincoat and umbrella, and as the evening went on other characters appeared who were properly costumed, not just wearing some small indicative touch over their grey uniform, so it wasn't consistent as a theme.  

Vanity Fair was dressed in brilliant colours and masses of spangles and glitter and balloons; it had cross-dressing, money raining from the flies, people dressed as devils, men wearing fake bare boobs with tassels on them...  It looked fabulous, both showy and horrible at once – exactly right, in fact. 

Most of the second half was dominated by the shape of the electric chair at the back of the stage, and all the references to the Delectable Mountains, the Celestial City, etc, were directed towards it.  This was weird and rather nasty to my mind.  The production scrupulously avoided any hint of Christian symbolism or iconography, substituting a rather chaotic mixture of symbols; some that seemed to have come from other religions and some that seemed to be saying all religion was empty and meaningless too. 

For example, the Herald who sends the Pilgrim on his way, part of the way into Act 1, was played as a visiting dictator or general, with all the prisoners in the gulag apparently lining up for inspection and the Pilgrim stepping forward and volunteering to set off, as if he’s been drilled to show what a good boy he’s become - thanks to being re-educated by the kindly government who care so much for all these foolish dissidents.  It really jarred.  At another point when it was obvious from the libretto that there should have been something fairly overtly Christian going on, the scene instead featured a circle of men doing tai chi for ages.

But the implicit criticism of religious faith wasn’t strong enough or carried through far enough to be really biting, and at the same time, all the time it was pulling against the obviously very sincere intentions of the original.  That grated badly; it was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring.  A clear critique might have been effective, if completely not what Vaughan Williams intended, but it wasn’t a clear critique, it was a muddly one.  I hate to sound like one of the religious Right (about as far from me as you can get!) but I did have a lurking feeling of "How many religions would you get away with this over?"  If one took a celebrated work of historical Jewish religious-polemic-cum-devotional literature, upended it and excised all overt Jewish signifiers to make it appear to be about something else entirely, wouldn't that be viewed as offensive and inappropriate?  Yet anyone going to see "The Pilgrim's Progress" who was hoping for a religiously-sensitive experience will have been disappointed; and anyone like my godparents, who are deeply devout and fairly High Church C of E, would have been horrified.

And it was all s.o. s.l.o.w...