Covent Garden’s powerful production of “Peter Grimes” pulls no punches, writes Michael White

The seaside town of Aldeburgh, in Suffolk, has a little Catholic church with a delightful garden that gets overlooked by visitors. Though many of them come as pilgrims, they are not there for religion. Aldeburgh’s pilgrims come in search of the composer Benjamin Britten, who lived there, and his opera Peter Grimes, which is set there – on the shingle beach where Grimes, a rough-edged fisherman at odds with the community around him, meets a tragic end.

In many ways, it’s just as well that little church gets overlooked, because you couldn’t sit through Peter Grimes – whose cast of characters includes a feeble vicar (Anglican) and drunken preacher (Methodist) – without concluding that the representatives of Christianity in Aldeburgh leave a lot to be desired. They’re part of an establishment that scapegoats Grimes and hounds him to his death in a disturbingly dark story. And I’ve rarely seen a darker production than the new one at Covent Garden: staged by Deborah Warner, conducted by Sir Mark Elder.

Warner takes a narrative meant to be happening in the early 1800s and updates it to the present day, playing like Scandi-noir and, in the process, taking Aldeburgh down a social peg or two. The town that is in reality a chic weekend retreat, with fancy restaurants and shops that sell exquisite bath accessories, becomes a run-down seaside dump with boarded-up attractions and marauding neo-Nazi thugs. The opera’s manhunt scene is always scary but, in Warner’s hands, is terrifying beyond measure. And the sense of having witnessed an unspeakable injustice at the end – when Grimes’s death is noted without comment or remorse – carries such crushing force, you feel you want to crawl out of the theatre on your hands and knees. This is as powerful as opera gets.

But it’s not just the staging that impresses. Elder handles Britten’s score with all guns blazing. The Royal Opera chorus blazes too. And with one notable exception it’s a fine cast, led by Bryn Terfel, John Tomlinson and Jacques Imbrailo, with Allan Clayton utterly magnificent in the title role: an artist born to play Grimes, and not just because he looks the part. The voice is strong but with a vulnerable lyricism suited to the desperation of a character whose roughness hides a longing for acceptance. Grimes is a definitive outsider figure: difficult, tormented, needing love. And Clayton gets that, absolutely.

Opera narratives aren’t always good material for sermons, but this piece provides one: an indictment of how cruel society becomes when pressures build, herd instinct kicks in, and we pick convenient victims to absorb our anger. Writing in the 1940s, Britten factored into Grimes his own experience as a homosexual on the receiving end of church and state. In 2022, Grimes speaks of populism, cancel culture and the moral thuggery of social media. It remains a story of our times.

It took a sense of humour for the Barbican Centre to mark its 40th anniversary with a concert of Haydn’s The Creation, because this is an oratorio that tracks the emergence of the world from chaos; and anyone familiar with the history of the Barbican will know that chaos was embedded in its founding DNA. The only difference is that God took seven days to work his wonders; the Corporation of London took appreciably longer. And even when the Centre finally opened, in 1982, it took years more to sort things out.

But that they did, eventually, come right is a story worth celebrating. And doing the honours for this anniversary concert was the London Symphony Orchestra: a key part of the story, and on brilliant form despite the late replacement of conductor Sir Simon Rattle, who was indisposed, by Harry Christophers. A more than respectable substitute.

This oratorio is feel-good music, written with an innocent view of the creation myths. Haydn delights in everything that God makes, from the “cheerful roaring” lion (as the text reads) to the worm that creeps “with sinuous trace”. You have to smile, and this was a performance that invited it – a joyous celebration of a time when life was perfect. Or appeared to be.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is so often heard I sometimes promise myself never to sit through it again. But last month I took a train to deepest West Sussex and did exactly that – because it was opening this year’s Shipley Festival: a fixture run by entrepreneurial violinist Andrew Bernardi and featuring cohorts of young performers.

In this case, led by students from Trinity Laban Conservatoire, they piled into a Four Seasons that was not only played but danced, acted and sung – as a sort of masque celebrating the wonders of the natural world. It breathed new life into an overly familiar score, with simple but effective designs and production ideas that managed to turn Vivaldi on his head without losing the sense that this still was Vivaldi: a composer whose work gets done so frequently not just because it’s easy but, I was reminded, because it’s good.  

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