Search - Benjamin Britten, Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra Covent Garden, Claire Watson :: Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes

A great Peter Grimes, but no longer absolute

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 02/20/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The already excellent sonics on Decca's 1958 Peter Grimes have been refurbished in this two-fer issued in 1999. It's a great bargain now, and a classic performance, of course, with inspired conducting from Britten himself, stressing the chamber quality of his orchestratoin. But the intervening years have brought quite a few more versions equally excellent in one way or another. Colin Davis re-thought the opera completely in his famous set on Philips, making Grimes more tormented and elemental; he was hugely aided by Jon Vickers' primoridal portrayal of a brutal, enigmatic, and haunted hero.



Peter Pears created the role, and the excerpts he recorded for EMI in 1948 are definitive; here, only ten years later, his vocal powers are much reduced, and there is a marked absence of inner torment and outwardly expressed anguish. Throughout the text runs a haunting but perplexing homoerotic theme, which Pears interprets sympatehtically. It's as if his shy, poetic Grimes can only relate to his apaprenntice boys, and their doom is symbolic of the doom faced by any man who is attracted, however innocently, to youths--this was a problem that Britten himself wrestled with in his personal life. On a simpler social level, Pears sings with a marked upper0class accent quite foreign to an illiterate fisherman.



Later performers see the role more grimly as a half-crazy anti-social misfit, torn by his inability to resist violence, fighting tto relate to Ellen but failing because of nameless inner demons. There's not much of that in the Pears/Britten conception; the composer hated Vickers' anguished Grimes so much that he walked out on it. I think everyone who loves this opera should own both interpretations, yet there's no doubt that Britten's conducting remains definitive."