The Deborah Warner Peter Grimes returns; Love and Loss by women composers; a brief return by the Trocks

I:   Return of the Deborah Warner “Peter Grimes” 

Benjamin Britten wrote vocal music for the tenor Peter Pears, his companion and lover and muse, for over thirty years.  A hallmark of almost all Britten’s writing for Pears’s voice is that at least one sequence makes extensive and high-exposure use of the tenor passaggio between middle and upper voices – the zone (around E at the top of the stave) that, for many tenors, spells trouble but which, for Pears, was where he sailed free and shone like a beacon.

A good example occurs in the Act One pub scene of “Peter Grimes” (1945): Grimes, the borough’s poetic wild visionary, suddenly startles the crowded pub by singing

“Now the Great Bear and Pleiades where earth moves/

Are drawing up the clouds of human grief/…

Who can turn skies back and begin again?”

For Jon Vickers – in other respects, an unforgettably intense Grimes – that long string of high Es could only be taken like an assault course, each one effortfully approached from beneath. Post-Pears British tenors – Robert Tear, Philip Langridge, Anthony Rolfe Johnson and others – have mastered how to keep up there, jumping with apparent ease from peak to peak.

Yet I believe nobody, even Pears, has taken all those quiet Es so glowingly as Allan Clayton is this May. When Clayton repeatedly sings the word “Who?” (even now I can hear how Vickers pole-vaulted his way up to each repetition – he made the strain eloquent), we hear the visionary rapture, the pathos, and we feel the private honey.

Covent Garden first saw this production of “Peter Grimes”, directed by Deborah Warner and focused around Clayton, in 2022; it had begun life at the Teatro Real, Madrid, and has also played at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma and the Opéra National de Paris. In several respects, it’s even better this time. The Royal Opera’s music director Jakub Hrůša, conducting, finds palpable excitement (more neurosis, even) from both the music and his players, drawing out more edge from strings, woodwind, and brass – especially in the storm music. Peter Mumford’s lighting of the morning opening of Act Two has a greater dawn warmth. But the beach is strewn with litter, and the borough is no rural idyll. One detail doesn’t quite convince now, anymore than it did in 2022 – the Act Two moment of Grimes’s striking Ellen Orford – and although the subsequent limp that Ellen (Maria Bengtsson) shows is more overdone than before, most of the realistic details in Warner’s modern-dress production are even more telling than before: the abusive lewdness of the preacher Bob Boles (John Graham-Hall) when drunk, the tough gaze of pub-keeper Auntie (Catherine Wyn-Rogers) from behind her large specs, the shrill naughtiness of her two “nieces” in their denim hot pants, the focus of Captain Bulstrode’s (Bryn Terfel’s) eyes on squalls and storms on the horizon, and above all the half-crazed detective ferretings of Mrs Sedley (Christine Rice, sometimes in a rain-bonnet), scuttling sideways across the beach like a crab.

And the most poetic image of all is the dead fisherman who never sings. The greatest masterstroke of Warner’s production is the aerial body, dressed like Grimes and his assistant in fishing-boat gear, who at intervals (always connected to music and drama) flies in the air like a corpse in the sea. At first, we identify him as the boy, working for Grimes, who died at sea before the opera’s start.  Early in Act Three, we identify him as Grimes’s next boy, who dies by another accident. At the opera’s end, we see that he may be Grimes himself. It’s a for-those-in-peril-on-the-sea opera, and – like more than one other Britten opera – it’s a ghost story. The timing and arcs of this aerial figure are piercing: his every appearance transforms and heightens the drama, most movingly.

Clayton’s inelegant body language for the title character is even more powerful now; and the incisively eloquent lines of his singing have even more colour and freedom.  I love the look of Bengtsson’s Ellen, in her patterned white sweater and jeans; her singing still seems very closely modelled on that of Heather Harper. (No model could be better, since Harper, for many years, was the role’s defintiive interpreter.) Hrůša propels the whole production marvellously: this revival is an important stage in his gradual immersion in Covent Garden’s particular brand of opera. It was good that Deborah Warner and her production colleagues joined singers and Hrůša onstage. I have seen seven productions of “Peter Grimes”, six of which have been marvellous; but this is the one that does most to add meaning and poetry to this superb music drama. What a work this is! Despite the many moments when the libretto is laboured in its wordiness, “Peter Grimes” is one of those rare dramas we seem to have known all our lives, like a folk tale.

II.  Tales of Love and Loss at the Linbury

Downstairs, in Covent Garden’s Linbury Theatre, “Tales of Love and Loss” – in repertory between May 1 and 9 – was a triple bill of short operas by three women composers, sung by young singers who are part of the Jette Parker Artists Programme. It amounted to little.

Elizabeth Maconchy’s “The Departure” (1961) was – it gradually emerged – a fleeting meeting between a wife’s ghost (she died in a car crash) and her still anguished husband.  Charlotte Bray’s “Making Arrangements” (2012) was about a husband dealing with the request from his unfaithful wife to send on the clothes she left behind: she, or rather an idea of her, revisited him, playing with items of wardrobe and with a male lover.  Finally, Elena Langer’s “Four Sisters” (2012, but in a new revision) was a comedy in which three sisters, mourning their father, are keen to enter the ranks of the New York super-rich, now that their father has died, but discover the will in which he left everything to another daughter – who turns out to be the maid. Some good jokes (“Four Sisters” is a comic antithesis to Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”, with plot twists linking the plot to Moscow, Idaho) don’t make this laboured romp become funny overall.

The singers Madeline Robinson, Hannah Edmunds, Jingwen Cai, Ellen Pearson, Sam Hird, and Giorgi Guliashvili – Hird performed in all three operas, while three women were in two each – did all they could with these unpromising works.  Peggy Wu conducted and Talia Stern directed all three.  Diction was excellent from every singer; Hird  proved a particularly good mover; Jingwen Cai has a mezzo-soprano voice of startlingly characterful maturity, capable of incisive wit, malice, and authority.

But I don’t go to the opera just to be a talent scout. All these three operas were lame.

III:   A Brief Return of the Trocks

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo, the American drag ballet company, is fifty-two years old. The central joke is really that these divas are none too bright but just adore dancing anyway. (Some of them double to play the few male roles in the repertory.)

Several of the jokes have currently grown stale: there’s little to laugh at in the Dying Swan, in which the ballerina (Olga Supphozova), apart from the fact that her tutu is moulting – very profusely indeed. Some of the pieces are hardly funny – as Maya Thickenthighya and Mikhail Mudkin dance that old chestnut, the pas de deux from “Le Corsaire” is only a bit odder than usual. The most modern item on the programme is Marina Plezegetovstageskaya’s “Metal Garden”, danced to gamelan music, is harmless, limp, witless. Parts of the audience laugh determinedly: it’s hard to know why.

Even so, the Trocks remain endearing, not least in their daft adherence to the rituals of classical ballet itself. In “Swan Lake, Act II”, Prince Siegfried has a solo that consists of nothing except his pointing his feet as he very slowly crosses the stage. It’s so absurdly fetishistic that it’s hilarious, especially as he decelerates and pauses now and then as if giving particular significance to one foot-pointing more than another. He – the dancer Araf Legupski – has the kind of Russian-specialty blonde coiffure that reminded me of a Kirov 1990s “Giselle” in which it seemed likely that both Albrecht and Hilarion (the two foremost male characters in “Giselle”) had visited the same beauty parlour earlier that day for both coiffure and maquillage.

Currently, the whole Trock idiom is at its most delicious in the “Paquita”.   “Paquita” (“the grand pas classique from ‘Paquita’”, to use its full nomenclature) is usually a “Ballerinas at a Gathering” number in which, you usually see between four and six solo variations (in high tutus and tiaras) for individual ballerinas; but the Trocks manage to present no fewer than seven solos, all of them delectable, all of them absurd, and all of them joyous. The whole dance theatre of “Paquita” – especially the heightened sexism and fabulous competitiveness whereby the not-very-male hero is the focal point of these not-very-female women, not to mention the pratfalls that occur in so sheerly perilous an art form – is catnip to what the Trocks are all about.

@Alastair Macaulay