Peter Grimes

Royal Opera House                                                  Until March 31, 3hrs 35mins

Rating:

In 1904 a German writer called England ‘the land without music’. The emergence of Elgar corrected that calumny, but it still took until after the Second World War for a world-class opera by a British composer to appear: Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes.

Grimes was an immediate hit, and remains so. This production, first seen in Madrid, is off to Paris and Rome. So far this year Grimes has had outings in Munich and Vienna, and will be heard in Venice in June, and at the Met in the autumn.

The director, Deborah Warner, whose Billy Budd was a success at Covent Garden in 2019, has received such praise, I’m sorry to have to express a few reservations.

Principal among them is the decision to update the action to today, and set it in post-Brexit Britain, in a grotty boarded-up town in Essex. Why does everything have to involve Brexit?

Britten clearly had in mind a place, The Borough, where the church still held sway, and ineffectual churchmen like the Rev Adams (James Gilchrist in fine form) remained influential.

Why would the awful Mrs Sedley (Rosie Aldridge, first class) feel she has to hide her laudanum addiction if she really lived in a dead-end Essex town today?

Musically, conductor Mark Elder offers, in what is apparently his first-ever Grimes in these islands, a magisterial performance, with excellent orchestral playing, and every encouragement given to as fine a team of British singers as have ever inhabited roles like Mayor Swallow (Sir John Tomlinson), Captain Balstrode (Sir Bryn Terfel), and the drug-peddling pharmacist Ned Keane (Jacques Imbrailo).

Imbrailo, remarkably, was even more outstanding as the saintly Billy Budd in 2019. Such versatility.

The Scandinavian soprano Maria Bengtsson is a disappointing Ellen, her voice too small for this auditorium, and her diction often unclear.

But a great Grimes requires an excellent portrayal of the half-crazed fisherman himself, and Allan Clayton as Grimes is vocally as good as it gets.

However, I am disappointed that Warner makes further efforts to dilute Grimes’s essentially self-centred and, so far as his young apprentices are concerned, cruel and heartless personality.

In George Crabbe’s original poem, Grimes was a remorseless psychopath. Britten, ever the outsider, toned him down.

But not so much as to show Grimes, during one of the interludes, searching the beach for his fallen apprentice, and tenderly gathering up the child’s body in his arms. Way too sentimental for me.

But this is nevertheless a compelling account of an opera that seems to grow in stature and recognition every passing year and proving yet again that without Britten, the post-war operatic world would be a sad place indeed.