Tag Archives: britten

Earworms

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brittenEarworms are funny things.  What causes a particular passage of music to stick in one’s mind almost obsessively?  I’m thinking about this now because I’ve seen two operas twice in the last couple of weeks and one is filling my waking moments with highly detailed flashbacks.  It’s not just tunes.  I’m hearing the orchestration and the inflexion of the words.  And it’s not the odd tune here and there.  It’s great long passages and many of them.  The other, although I would recognise most every phrase on hearing it, is not doing that at all.  Here’s the odd thing.  The one that’s leaving no impression at all is number three world wide in terms of number of performances(1) and is, of course, Puccini’s La Bohème.  The one I can’t get out of my head is far down the list at number 88 and it’s Britten’s Peter Grimes (and note that it’s the Britten centenary).

Know I have to ponder whether there is any connection between this and the fact that while all the cheap seats for Peter Grimes seem to sell out, the boxes on fat cat row are half empty.

Note 1: http://www.operabase.com/top.cgi?lang=en&

Heppner as Grimes

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It was back to the Four Seasons Centre last night for a second look at the COC’s Peter Grimes.  This time Ben Heppner was singing the titled role as scheduled.  Everything else was much the same as opening night and so I’ll just focus on the differences between Tony Dean-Griffey and Ben.  In many ways their interpretations are similar.  They both come across as “gentle giants”; alienated and outside Borough society but not really “brutal and coarse” as the libretto has it.  In both cases the violence offered to Ellen in Act 2 seems to come from nowhere.  The big difference, it seems to me, is that Dean Griffey has the voice to sing that interpretation.  He can float the high notes in Now the Great Bear and Pleiades and What Harbour Shelters Peace in the disturbing and otherwordly manner of a Pears or a Langridge.  Perhaps Heppner once had that quality but if he did it has gone.  What Heppner does have is great acting powers.  The prologue and the final scene were nuanced and compelling and worth the price of admission.  In between he had his moments but he clearly isn’t over the problems that kept him out of opening night and there were a couple of quite jaw dropping moments in the scene in his hut.  None of this stopped the Four Seasons crowd from giving him  a rapturous reception.

Heppner as Grimes

Photo: Michael Cooper courtesy of the COC

Peter Grimes remains a great show with brilliance from the orchestra and chorus, a very fine Balstrode from Alan Held and strong performances from the other soloists.  I’m glad I saw the show with both tenors and I would certainly recommend it highly with either.  There are four more performances between now and October 26th.

Poetic Echoes: A Britten Celebration

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Yesterday’s free concert in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre saw four members of the Ensemble Studio singing contrasting works by Benjamin Britten.  First up was bass-baritone Gordon Bintner with excerpts from Tit for Tat; settings of works by Walter de la Mare.  These were full blooded performances and Bintner gave full reign to his powerful and flexible voice.  It’s a terrific instrument but I would have preferred a little more restraint and subtlety, especially in something as intimate as these pieces.  Next up was tenor Andrew Haji with excerpts from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo.  It was rather a similar story.  He has a fine, operatic voice and gave the songs a rather operatic treatment.  It was good singing but not in the idiom one is accustomed to hearing this music sung in.

Photo: Karen Reeves

Photo: Karen Reeves

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What harbour shelters peace?

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Readers of this blog will likely know that Peter Grimes is a very special opera for me.  I’ve watched it live and on recordings a lot.  I think about it a lot troo so the chance to see it live is rather special.  It’s even more special when it’s done as well as at the Four Seasons Centre last night in the opening performance of a new run of Neil Armfield’s much travelled production, revived here by Denni Sayers.

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Ben Heppner at Toronto Reference Library

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heppnerLast night’s event in the Star Talks series at the Toronto Reference Library involved Richard Ouzounian interviewing Ben Heppner who is in town to sing the title role in Peter Grimes.  It was a very genial interview; no tough questions about elitism or whether opera was dying.  Rather it was very much the tale of the kid from Dawson Creek who beats Renee Fleming and Susan Graham in the Met auditions and becomes a superstar.  It was curiously like Desert Island Discs without the music.

There were a couple of interesting stories.  The best concerned Heppner and Richard Jones’ production of Lohengrin (available on DVD/Blu-ray with Jonas Kaufmann in the title role).  It’s the one where Lohengrin and Elsa build a house then Lohengrin burns it down.  Well it turns out the the three year old Ben Heppner managed to burn the family home down and during the dress of Lohengrin had a pretty strong repressed memory reaction at the point where he had to set the cradle alight.  It says a lot for his professionalism that the first night went off without incident.

I did get to ask him for his views on different kinds of tenor singing the role of Grimes.  After all it was created for one of the most ethereal operatic tenors ever but ids frequently sung today by full on heldentors.  He said he didn’t think the voice was as important as how fully the singer inhabited the character and singled out Philip Langridge in that regard.  I have to agree with him.  I love Langridge’s Grimes.  It’s a real pity the video recording of it is so awful.

Peter Grimes runs for seven performances at the COC starting October 5th.

Albert Herring

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Britten’s Albert Herring is mysteriously under represented in the DVD catalogue.  The work is performed quite often being relatively inexpensive to mount and suitable for smaller venues but the many productions haven’t led to many recordings.  I have only been able to find one and that dates back to 1985 when it was recorded at Glyndebourne.  That’s appropriate enough as that’s the house the piece premiered in in 1947.  At least it’s a  fair and effective representation of the work.  Peter Hall’s production takes few liberties with the libretto and is a rather literal and effective, if necessarily somewhat caricatured,  representation of life in a Suffolk village.  The sets and costumes are evocative; especially the hall of Lady Billows’ house which really evokes a 17th century Great Hall and, as the view through the window tells us, is set in or close to the village, not in an isolated park.  There’s quite a lot of that kind of attention to detail in this production.

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Jealousy, rage, love and fear

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It’s a curious thing how some works get over recorded and others are almost entirely neglected.  For example, there’s only one video recording of Weill’s Die Dreigroschenoper and that a 1931 film that omits huge chunks of the stage work.  It’s inspiration fares little better.  There’s only one video recording of The Beggar’s Opera by Johann Pepusch and John Gay.  It’s a 1963 BBC TV production of Benjamin Britten’s reworking of the piece for the English Opera Group based on a stage production by Colin Graham. [ETA: There are actually two other versions; a 1953 movie version with Lawrence Olivier and a 1980s version with Roger Daltrey and John Eliot Gardiner].

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Season announcements

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Announcements for the upcoming season in Toronto are starting to come in.  Voicebox: Opera in Concert have announced a thee show season at the St. Lawrence Centre for the arts. The season opens on Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 2:30 PM with Benjamin Britten’s Gloriana.  This isn’t a work one gets to see very often so even a piano accompanied concert version is very welcome.  Musical Director and Pianist will be Peter Tiefenbach.  Soprano Betty Waynne Allison will sing Elizabeth I with tenor Adam Luther as Essex. The cast also includes Jennifer Sullivan, Jesse Clark and Mark Petracchi.

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Paramore shall welcome woe

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Various thoughts about the Channel 4 film of Britten’s Owen Wingrave led to me seeking out the original BBC TV version from 1970, now available on DVD.  It’s extremely interesting and worthwhile.  Britten himself conducts and the cast includes many of the people involved in the first productions of many other Britten operas.  They include Peter Pears (General Wingrave/Narrator), John Shirley-Quirk (Coyle), Benjamin Luxon (Owen), Janet Baker (Kate), Heather Harper Mrs.Coyle) and Jennifer Vyvyan (Mrs. Julian).  The quality of the music making is superb and I found myself constantly surprised and delighted by details brought out by Britten supported by the excellent English Chamber Orchestra.  At the same time, the fluent and idiomatic singing pointed up the excellence of Myfanwy Piper’s libretto.  This really is Britten at his best.

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Paramore revisited

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Great though my admiration for Benjamin Britten’s music is I wouldn’t consider him a creator of memorable female characters.  There’s Ellen Orford, of course, but one struggles to find a Tosca, Lucia or Violetta in his oeuvre.  I open with this because what struck me watching the 2001 Channel 4 film of Owen Wingrave for a second time was how generally unsympathetic the female characters are.  This is an opera with a female librettist (Myfanwy Piper) and the film has a female director (Margaret Williams) yet, with the exception of the fairly ineffectual Mrs. Coyle, the female characters embody an unthinking militarism and behave with extreme malevolence towards Wingrave; none more so than his “girlfriend” Kate. The filming reinforces this with close up scenes of groups of the women spitting venom at young Wingrave.

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