Britten’s Peter Grimes turns 80 this June, and it’s still hard to credit it. The whole phenomenon, that is – the sudden emergence of the brilliant, all-too-facile 31-year-old Britten as a fully formed musical dramatist of unignorable force. W.H. Auden had urged him to risk everything – to step outside his admirers’ ‘warm nest of love’ – and in the first moments of Peter Grimes, Britten does precisely that. The folk-opera bustle of the opening tribunal scene dissolves into the desolate bird cry of the first Sea Interlude and straight away, you’re in the presence of something unimaginably vaster and more true. It pins you to your seat.
That was certainly the impression I had from Tomas Hanus, conducting the orchestra and chorus of Welsh National Opera. Not the only one, of course: this new staging by Melly Still takes any number of artistic gambles. But the orchestra and chorus are the tide upon which Peter Grimes swims, and Hanus and his company made that point more uninhibitedly, and poetically, than I’ve ever heard. The concentrated power that the WNO chorus directed into the auditorium could have stripped the skin from your face. Hanus, meanwhile, found epic breadth and depth in the orchestra. Sullen beauty erupted into sonic violence; string textures rasped and woodwinds shrilled. I don’t think it was Hanus’s nationality alone that prompted thoughts of Janacek.
Not a bad foundation, then, for the retelling of a modern myth, and in Still’s production everything unnecessary is pared back. Malcolm Rippeth’s washed-out lighting suggests huge maritime skies, and the few scenic items respect the opera’s setting and work hard as symbols of the characters’ inner life.
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