One of the proudest boasts to come from Britten HQ in Aldeburgh during the composer’s anniversary last year was that performances of his works were proliferating across the globe — and not just in the UK — as never before. If the Opéra de Lyon might be a little late to the anniversary party in featuring Britten in its annual Eastertime opera festival only this year, the fact that it’s doing so at all certainly provides evidence of the composer’s worldwide reputation, as well as of the artistic adventurousness of Serge Dorny, reinstalled for the time being as the opera house’s boss after a short-lived stint at Dresden’s Semperoper came to an abrupt end in February. It also speaks volumes for the house’s excellent, unshowy Japanese music director, Kazushi Ono.
Here Ono was in charge of the two new productions, of Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw; the third work was Curlew River, the first of Britten’s Church Parables, in a production by Olivier Py that was seen in Edinburgh nearly a decade ago. Together, the three works give a pretty decent conspectus of Britten’s development as an operatic composer, and all deal with the outsider protagonists to which he was instinctively drawn. A less PR-friendly common thread was that of abused and murdered children; the fact dead young boys feature, in some guise or another, in all three didn’t really chime with the chirpy ‘Keep Calm and Listen to Britten’ banner that adorned the façade of the city’s opera house — drastically modernised a couple of decades ago, so that inside it manages the impressive feat of suggesting simultaneously both the interior of a night club and the exterior of a battleship.
In any case, this Grimes — staged by the Japanese director Yoshi Oïda — was not as fiercely confrontational as some: it was certainly no match in that regard for David Alden’s production at ENO, still fresh in the mind after its revival earlier in the year.
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