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Tuesday 2 December 2008

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Britten surprises

Michael Tanner

Wednesday, 30th January 2008

Peter Grimes
Opera North

Of all Britten’s operas Peter Grimes is the one I have seen most often, and it remains not only the one that I find it hardest to make up my mind about, but also the one which I still don’t feel I know especially well. There are the famous passages, not only the sea interludes but also Grimes’s monologues, ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’ and his big tune, sung first to the words ‘What harbour shelters peace?’, there is Ellen Orford’s touching, rather less famous Embroidery aria in Act III, which is a passage of genuine repose in this restless and often angry score; and there are the famous set choral pieces, ‘Grimes is at his exercise’ and the terrifying shouts of the villagers in hot pursuit of him. But I always find, and am not by any means sorry that I do, that there are passages that I had hardly noted before which strike me as interesting or surprising, and that the overall shape of the acts, which tend to move, after the Prologue, from the whole community to a concentration on the central figure alone, is less clear than that summary suggests.

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