Above: Allan Clayton as Peter Grimes; a Met Opera photo
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Saturday October 28th, 2022 matinee – I didn’t like the Met’s current PETER GRIMES production, which premiered in 2008, when I saw it in the House, but later I watched it on DVD and found it thrilling. For this revival, I pondered getting a seat with a view, but then opted for practicality and took a score desk.
I first saw GRIMES in 1983; it was a day I shall never forget. We’d been to SIMON BOCCANEGRA in the afternoon, and I was exhausted; sitting there waiting for GRIMES to begin, I thought “I’ll never make it to to end.” But moments after the curtain rose, Jon Vickers delivered his blazing first line, “I swear by almighty God…”, stepping on Swallow’s line in his impatience, and from that moment on, I was riveted. Vickers, his colleagues Elisabeth Söderström and Thomas Stewart, and a stellar lineup of singing actors (Jean Kraft, Lili Chookasian, Jerome Hines, Dale Duesing, Ezio Flagello, and Robert Nagy) gave me a thrilling first GRIMES, under the baton of the great Sir John Pritchard.
In the ensuing years, I experienced two magnificent portrayals of Grimes at The Met: Philip Langridge and Anthony Dean Griffey each made an overwhelming impression. This afternoon, the British tenor Allan Clayton staked out his own claim to the role with a stunningly sung performance. I first heard the voice of Allan Clayton on the excellent Decca DVD entitled Britten’s Endgame.
The Met Orchestra were on top form this afternoon, and the opera’s interludes – well-beloved as a concert ‘suite’ – were by turns painfully beautiful and searingly violent. The conductor, Nicholas Carter, was at his finest in these glorious passages. But he was less successful when solo voices were singing, sometimes giving too much volume and either covering the singers or leaving them to struggle for a heftier sound. The Met Chorus, with so much to do in this opera, were simply grand: “O tide that waits for no man…spare our coasts!“
Allan Clayton’s Grimes was more lyrical in sound than the other tenors I have heard live in the role, though he has good cutting power when he needs it. It was in the poetic passages of the music that the tenor made our hearts ache for this hapless, misunderstood man. From the start, his wonderfully clear diction made every word count. In the opening scene in the court, telling of the death of the first apprentice, Mr. Clayton drew us in.
As the opera unfolds, the character’s hopes for a new life are raised, only to be dashed. Mr. Clayton’s extraordinarily expressive singing caught every nuance of these shifts in Grimes’s mental state. His poignant “Great Bear and Pleiades“, where he sings of the “…clouds of human grief…” along with “What harbour shelters peace?, and “In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home” were hauntingly sung, in contrast to the deranged scene in which he torments the apprentice and eventually sends the boy down the sea cliff to his doom. My feeling is that Mr. Clayton’s Grimes may be the closest to Peter Pears’ in vocally capturing the personality of the doomed fisherman. Mr. Clayton’s performance deservedly won the audience’s vociferous approval.
Soprano Laura Wilde made an unexpected Met debut this afternoon as Ellen Orford. Her voice, with a somewhat girlish timbre, was appealing in her Act II scene with the apprentice, John, and especially so in her third act Embroidery aria. In more dramatic passages, the conductor sometimes failed to do the right thing, leaving Ms. Wilde to push the tone. The soprano and Mr. Clayton were well-matched in general, She was warmly received by the audience.
Balstrode fills an odd place in the opera: as one of the few true friends and defenders of Grimes, the character is key; but Britten does not give him all that much to sing. Adam Plachetka was fine in the role today.
The librettist and composer create expert character studies amongst the townsfolk of The Borough, affording wonderful opportunities for today’s cast. Prime among these is Swallow, splendidly voiced this afternoon by the excellent Patrick Carfizzi.
Two mezzo roles offered Denyce Graves and Michaela Martens many choice phrases as Auntie and Mrs. Sedley respectively. After a few warm-up notes, Ms. Graves sounded very well; “A joke’s a joke, and fun is fun!” she jibed sarcastically. Ms. Martens, with the meatier role of one of the opera’s most despicable characters (a busybody and gossip with a drug addiction,) got a round of laughs from the crowd with “I’ve never been in a pub in my life!” and pulled out some darkish chest tones at “Murder most foul it is!” and “Crime, which my hobby is...”
Harold Wilson as Hobson kicked the opera off with his strong-voiced summons of Grimes to take the oath; later, Hobson tries to evade Ellen’s offer to accompany him to pick up Grimes’s next apprentice. Chad Shelton (Bob Boles) and Justin Austin (Ned Keene) each made their mark, and the always-effective Tony Stevenson excelled as the Reverend Horace Adams. As Auntie’s two nieces, Brandie Sutton and Maureen McKay sang prettily; they were joined by Mlles. Wilde and Graves in the opera’s pensive quartet, one of the score’s unique highlights.
With this performance, PETER GRIMES seemed to edge out BILLY BUDD as my favorite Britten opera; however, that pendulum might swing back if I ever get to see BILLY BUDD again, just as the very top spot on my list of favorite operas has shifted between ARIADNE AUF NAXOS and ELEKTRA for years.
PETER GRIMES is a cruel opera; the characters (well, except for Ellen) each have a mean streak, and zero tolerance for anyone who is ‘different’. Growing up in a similar small town, where everyone knows (and minds) everyone else’s business, I learned to keep mostly to myself, leaving the world behind to live in my own dream-space filled with opera, and with longings I didn’t understand. Like Peter, I had an understanding girlfriend who protected me in a way, and soothed my sadness. My classmates were cruel, but things never turned brutal, as they do in The Borough: “Bring the branding iron and knife…what’s done now is done for life!” I sometimes wonder how I endured those long, worrisome days.
Metropolitan Opera House
October 28th, 2022 matinee
PETER GRIMES
Britten
Peter Grimes............Allan Clayton
Ellen Orford............Laura Wilde (debut)
Captain Balstrode.......Adam Plachetka
Mrs. Sedley.............Michaela Martens
Auntie..................Denyce Graves
Niece...................Brandie Sutton
Niece...................Maureen McKay
Hobson..................Harold Wilson
Swallow.................Patrick Carfizzi
Bob Boles...............Chad Shelton
Rev. Horace Adams.......Tony Stevenson
Ned Keene...............Justin Austin
John....................Brandon Chosed
Villagers: Helena Brown, Ross Benoliel, Scott Dispensa,
Ned Hanlon, Jeremy Little, Patrick Miller, Steven Myles, Earle Patriarco,
Jonathan Scott, Meredith Woodend, Yohan Yi
Conductor...............Nicholas Carter
Settling in at my desk well before curtain time. I opened the old, heavy score I had taken from the library, and found the incredible inscription shown below. It means that Benjamin Britten actually held this score in his hands.
~ Oberon
Oberon's Glade 