Review by Peter Grimes – beauty and horror on Warner’s themes | Classical music

‘WCan you turn the sky over and start over?” That’s the question that fisherman Peter Grimes asks the universe at the end of his short scene in Act 1 of Britten’s opera – two and a half minutes. one-of-a-kind songs, breathless, in the end the people around him all think he’s crazy or drunk, but we the audience know he’s a different person, who sees better than any of them.

For someone who spends his life looking at the sky, the words are as concise as they are beautiful – and there is a simplicity in the way Allan Clayton sings them that combines directness and poetry in his Grimes, a role that currently has few competitors. Perhaps it sums up Deborah Warner’s work, which has been transformed into a modern town, on the English left, which has everyday events that feel like an invitation to take everything in reality, but still has interesting ideas from the beginning. In the prologue, Grimes is at center stage believing in his sleep the horrors of his appearance on the stage while a fishing boat, suspended from the fly, hangs like the sword of Damocles over his head; in the orchestral music that follows this, the pilot descends slowly to be caught by Grimes, again and again.

Warner’s production opened in Madrid in 2021 and he first arrived in London the following yearwhen the bandits of the village carrying the flag in the group of the violent people felt themselves to be indescribable; he feels more now. But there is the beauty of Michael Levine’s setbehind it could be a tiled wall inside a harbor fish market but it could equally be the open sea, according to Peter Mumford’s light. It’s the contrast between the routine of plastic boxes and fishing gear on stage and the grace of aviation, for example, that Warner gets to know. Anachronism in Grimes having a young child as a student, and the contradictions of how the boy relates to him, in fear but sometimes with childlike love, seems to be less than the human problems that the contradictions show.

Also in Madrid and London, the show has been seen in theaters in Paris and Rome – always with Clayton in the title role, and the rest of the cast is the same, surprisingly in the opera. The result is a familiar cast, from Maria Bengtsson’s emotional but helpful Ellen Orford, and Bryn Terfel’s angry Balstrode to Barnaby Rea’s scornful Hobson. Newcomers are Christine Rice, the charming Mrs Sedley who makes a wonderful double appearance and Catherine Wyn-Rogers’ no-nonsense Auntie. The conductor, who is also new to the team, is the music director of the Royal Opera, Jakub Hrůša. There are some passages where he takes his time – Balstrode’s homilies in the pub, for example, which show us the terrible respect with which the old pilot is held. However, most of the time he conducts his excellent orchestra, which makes us feel less troubled by the opera’s strangeness.