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OPERA REVIEW
Power and Eloquence "Peter Grimes" At Its Best
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By Marvin Tartak
The San Francisco Opera has given its public the wonderful modern opera, Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," in the best performance it has had in this city. Many consider it the finest 20th century opera written in English; why oh why did it take 22 years to return to San Francisco?
The singers were great, the production solid and compelling, but the stars of the show were the conductor and his orchestra, followed closely by the overwhelming chorus. Donald Runnicles has shown again that he has no peer in accompanying voices with a mammoth body of instruments in the pit. He shaped every phrase with power and eloquence made especially moving by his personal involvement. Rarely have opera soloists' words been heard so clearly. Balance between musicians and singers was accomplished with text-book clarity; yet the music was emotionally persuasive. Britten achieved a beauty of form and substance in his first major opera (1945).
Though the singing of the American tenor Thomas Moser, as Grimes, was without fault, it was his acting that carried the role. Grimes is a fairly despicable character, given to rages, bouts of paranoid self-pity, a physical brute known to his neighbors for beating his boy apprentices. With every ounce of sympathy, Moser painted Grimes as lost inside himself. His was a figure of savage force untempered by restraint, fantasizing about a better life with money, a home, marriage to Ellen, the village schoolmistress. But he is hopelessly inarticulate, doomed to fail. While Britten provided much of the color for this sad creature, Moser created a Grimes with more dimension than one could have thought possible.
Deborah Riedel's vibrant soprano voice and portrayal projected the purity of the endearing Ellen, ever hoping to convert Grimes, unable to admit defeat. Alan Held sang the role of Captain Balstrode with force and solidity, the one character in The Borough to speak for reason. Matthew Lord portrayed the loud-mouth Boles, quick to judge in anger, the catalyst in the village's hatred of Grimes; he was terrific. The smaller parts--Hobson the carrier (John Relyea), Swallow, the lawyer (Stafford Dean), Mrs. Sedley, the busybody (Catherine Cook), Auntie, the innkeeper (Clair Powell), Ned Keene, the apothecary (Theodore Baerg)--were brought to realistic life.
Beyond these people stands The Borough itself, the small fishing village on the East Coast of England (in 1830), filled with grinding, sour personalities, all intent on hating Grimes, the one who doen't belong. Acting as the mob, the chorus is the antagonist at the center of the story. Britten and Montagu Slater, his librettist, fashioned their opera after an episode in a long poem by George Crabbe (c. 1809). Britten indicts the people of The Borough, their hateful cruelty, suspicions, gossip, their willingness to believe the worst of their weakest member. Aware of how the others deny him, Grimes falls into the trap of hope that maybe he can win their respect. Who attacks Grimes? The chorus with their wicked, sardonic cry referring to his brutality: "Grimes is at his exercise". They hunt him down on the merest suggestion of wrong-doing.
The chorus fill the stage with their obsessions; they sing wonderfully the difficult music, the complicated ensemble writing. Their movement, however, is somewhat confined by a claustrophobic set from the original production here of 1973. The street scene is bisected by a bridge, confining the players to a narrow, horizontal stretch. Often the crowd mills about, moving two inches this way, and two inches that, activity that looks busy but goes nowhere. True, in their happier moments, the dancing in Act III, they fly about with abandon; but when they turn savage, they drown the principals in weight and mass. They oppress Grimes - and scare the hell out of the rest of us.
After all is said and done, one is left with one other dimension to the story: the landscape of East Anglia (and home to Britten), the seacoast, the marshes, the harsh, bleak greyness of life in that part of the world. We are there, we can feel it, smell it, live it. Those magnificent interludes ["Dawn", "Storm", "Sunday morning", "Moonlight"] echo in the memory after the tragedy is finished. Runnicles let his imagination loose in this, and one is forever grateful for it.
(Marvin Tartak, a pianist noted for contemporary music, teaches a course in Opera at City College of San Francisco. He has written program notes for the San Francisco Symphony and Opera, has also has edited two volumes of Rossini for the Fondazione Rossini, and is soon to embark on a third.)
©1998 Marvin Tartak, all rights reserved
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Thomas Moser (Peter Grimes)
Alan Held (Balstrode) and Deborah Riedel (Ellen)
Theodore Baerg (apothecary) and Catherine Cook (Mrs. Sedley)