Grimes triumphant

‘Peter Grimes!’ Ranked high above us in the Usher Hall — a mob smelling blood, hot for the kill — the chorus let forth those three primal cries, and we were all lost. The modesty-curtain of civilisation was torn away, and our basest human urges — hate, revenge, suspicion of difference, delight at weakness — were exposed. Looking up at those faces, shielded by no proscenium, separated by no stage lighting, I don’t know when I have ever felt more horrified, more shaken by a performance.

‘A staged concert,’ writes conductor Ivan Fischer, ‘looks for complete harmony and coordination between music and theatre… for organic unity in which vocal and acting skills merge completely.’ He’s not wrong. But nor is he alone in recognising the infinite theatrical possibility of opera in concert. Sadly, his own Edinburgh International Festival Don Giovanni (designed, he laboriously explained, as a ‘staged concert’ and definitely not a ‘semi-staging’, with all the half-heartedness that implies) was a limp affair compared to the ferocity of this weaponised Grimes.