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A Painless Peter Grimes Los Angeles
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center
10/18/2000 - Oct. 24, 27 and 29; Nov. 1 and 4
Benjamin Britten: Peter Grimes
Philip Langridge (Peter Grimes), Nancy Gustafson (Ellen Orford), Richard Stilwell (Captain Balstrode), Louis Lebherz (Swallow), Judith Christin (Auntie), Greg Fedderly (Bob Boles), Suzanna Guzmán (Mrs. Sedley), John Atkins (Ned Keene), Michael Li-Paz (Hobson), Jonathan Mack (Reverend Horace Adams), Shana Blake and Jordan Gumucio (Auntie’s Nieces)
Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, Los Angeles Opera Chorus
Richard Armstrong (conductor), John Schlesinger (director)
A co-production of L.A. Opera, Washington (D.C.) Opera, and Teatro alla Scala
Los Angeles Opera wasted a great performance by its Orchestra, and good ones by its Chorus and cast, in director John Schlesinger’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.
Composed in response to George Crabbe’s verse story about a poor Suffolk fishing village, Grimes creates a deeply sad and troubling musical landscape in which both the natural and the human environments rage against any extraordinary individuals who are, because of either choice or circumstance, actually in touch with their inner torment rather than being deadened to its pain. It is not an easy opera, nor a happy one, and any production which smoothes out its ragged edges does it a disservice.
Schlesinger, whose credits include a host of important films that are notable for finding ragged edges, including Midnight Cowboy and Far From the Madding Crowd, is also knowledgeable about the classical music world as his 1988 film Madame Sousatzka attests. Here, however, he has misjudged the ability of Britten’s music alone to carry the action of stage without tying the torment of Grimes to concrete details. If, as Michael Crabb’s program notes claim, “Schlesinger rejects any homosexual implications” in the story, there are other large areas of emotional distress to explore.
Of course, Grimes as a large symphonic/vocal/choral poem has a certain appeal in this Gramophone Age, especially when Richard Armstrong and his forces responded with such magnificent weight and eloquence. Indeed, the orchestral sound rose out of the pit in waves of beauty and fury as if the ocean herself were residing there; it could have been the Berlin Philharmonic playing and no one would have been the wiser. The Chorus also rose to its various challenges with superb poise and agility. And the large cast headed by Philip Langridge and Nancy Gustafson sang out boldly, poignantly and mournfully as required. As a purely musical experience, the result had the audience deeply moved by the great interludes, and had them gasping at the pivotal dramatic events: The march up to Grimes’s hut to look for the apprentice, Grimes’s mad scene, and his off-stage suicide carried out amidst the cruel unconcern of the village.
But in order for Britten’s symphonic poem to become an opera, a production must imbue its characters with the actual details of the tragedy, not just its overall look and feel. We must be convinced that Grimes is not merely a sad and lonely figure, but one whose tragic dimensions come directly from specific relationships he attempts to fashion. Britten’s own uneasy sexual existence, his experience as a pacifist in a strange land, and the War’s grim ashes, from which the world was just beginning to emerge when Grimes was premiered in London in 1945, provide ample material for a director to work with. Whether Grimes has raped his young apprentices or murdered them, whether he actually loves Ellen or grotesquely masquerades to do so in order to manipulate her own need for love, it must be brought to the audience’s attention. Not surprisingly, in the wake of such a lack of concern for details, there were no “half-naked sea-boys” on stage, and only the most cursory hint of Britten’s love of children like those Grimes, symbolically or literally, has killed.
Schlesinger had another serious obstacle to work against. Designer Luciana Arrighi’s surprisingly large Suffolk village looked more like a fashionable Italian coast town in bad weather than the grim rural England Crabbe and the composer had in mind. In so doing, Arrighi helped reduce one of the most powerful tragic operatic statements of the last century into a bland if occasionally chilling ghost tale of richness and grandeur more appropriate to Puccini than Britten.
When new Principal Conductor Kent Nagano arrives at his post next season, this conservatism may go out the window. Perhaps Nagano will also lead the Opera’s magnificent orchestra in actual symphonic concerts rather than imagined ones like this Peter Grimes.
Laurence Vittes
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