Britten’s Owen Wingrave is a curiously neglected opera.  It’s rarely performed live and the only recorded versions are 2 CD recordings plus DVDs of TV productions.  The earliest of each feature Benjamin Luxon in the title role and Peter Pears as General Wingrave.  The DVD version holds up surprisingly well for a 1970 TV production.  The later DVD version is also over 20 years old and features Gerald Finley in a, to my mind, ill conceived production for Channel 4 updated to the 1950s.  So I was interested to get my hands on a 2008 Chandos recording with Peter Coleman-Wright as Owen.

The first thing that struck me listening was what a good opera it is.  The music is complex, colourful and dramatic and sets a really good libretto by Myfanwy Piper.  Listening to it, I was struck by how in many ways it seems like the ultimate development of the ideas that Britten was introducing in The Turn of the Screw and Curlew River.  There’s some flirting with atonality and the influence of gamelan and, overall, a kind of disturbing ethereal quality.  And it’s all the more powerful because it’s scored for a much larger orchestra than the previous two works.  Is it Britten’s “best opera”?  It might be.

Certainly the Chandos recording makes a good case for it.  Richard Hickox gets a thoroughly idiomatic sound out of the City of London Sinfonia and the soloists are very good.  The star might just be Alan Opie as the tutor Coyle.  It’s a very human reading of perhaps the most sympathetic character in the story.  There are also notable performances from a youthful sounding James Gilchrist as Lechmere and a surprisingly sympathetic, and equally youthful sounding Kate from Pamela Helen Stephen.  The rest of the cast is also excellent.  The only one I have reservations about is Coleman-Wright’s Owen.  He gets Owen right.  He treads the fine line between passion felt and overt emotion not expressed as befits one playing the scion of a 19th century military family.  The problem is that he sounds rather too mature of voice for a character who is 18 or 19.  It’s a small thing in an all around excellent performance that outshines the earlier recordings.  Really I think this is a recording that anyone with a serious interest in Britten’s operas should hear.

The Chandos engineers make a notable contribution to the success of the disk.  It’s extremely clear and well balance with a deep and clearly defined stereo sound stage.  It’s notably superior in audio quality to the earlier recordings and every word is clearly intelligible which I particularly appreciated as I didn’t have a copy of the digital booklet which I imagine has the text.

This recording is available as a physical 2 CD set, as MP3 or in FLAC format; CD quality and 24 bit/96kHz versions.  I listened to CD quality.

Catalogue number: Chandos CHAN 10473(2)