For Welsh National Opera to match the success of the stunning Death in Venice with their new Peter Grimes was always going to be difficult. And yet, musically, this compelling performance of Britten’s masterwork, premiered in 1945, shows the company in the strongest possible form. Music director Tomáš Hanus brought a real integrity to his reading of the score: detailed, passionate, and ensuring that the various orchestral interludes were part of an organically cohesive whole.
In adapting George Crabbe’s 1810 narrative poem, Britten had already softened the unruly ruffian that was Crabbe’s Grimes, and tenor Nicky Spence, debuting in the title role, made him a far more sympathetic individual again in Melly Still’s staging.
Here, a misunderstood misfit, contemptuous of the parochial small-minded bitching of the Borough villagers and their assumption of his criminal culpability, Grimes’s hopes of redeeming himself through marriage to schoolteacher Ellen Orford seems credible; their relationship, such as it is, is given a tenderness, with hints of intimacy, with Grimes’ guilt at the death of his apprentice all the more poignant, pointing up the flash-points of volatility and then the moments of madness.
Against a bare set – four harbour capstans defining the front of stage, lighting capturing the moody grey of the East Anglian coast, a single boat suspended above the action, black as doom – the villagers’ fierce prejudice against Grimes and the mob mentality, baying for blood, has the seething force of a wild and cruel sea. The personalities of the various villagers implicated in the whole vendetta are all equally vividly drawn and sung.
Of the considerable choreographic element, the recurring busyness of four dancing apprentices shifting ropes was frenetic though, with shades of the rope-weaving Norns, catching Grimes in a tangled web offered a striking metaphor. Sarah Connolly’s Auntie, landlady of the Boar, was richly sung, but looked rather mystified that her pub consisted only of a single window-frame and a door frame irritatingly danced around to signify the various comings and goings, not to mention the questionable goings-on of her nieces, (Fflur Wyn and Eiry Price). Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s Mrs Sedley, addicted to amateur detection and to laudanum, was finely delineated.
Some of Still’s interpolations added ambiguities: Captain Balstrode – the excellent David Kempster – witnesses a distraught Grimes cradling the body of the apprentice who falls to his death, with the corpse then rolled into the sea, the knowledge adds to the tensions of his and Ellen’s attempts to protect Grimes from those bent on his blood.
As Ellen, Sally Matthews is a quietly vibrant stage presence but with a vibrato that gives the lyricism of her lines too approximate a feel for comfort. Spence finds vocal colours to reflect the complexities of Grimes’s character and his outsider’s otherness; his aria Now the Great Bear and Pleiades has a luminous intensity. But the most rapturous reception was for the WNO orchestra, who Hanus brought onto stage with everyone else for the curtain call. Their wonderfully lucid playing is central to the overall intensity of the evening’s experience.
