Amid the drab blues and greys, a child’s red Norwegian sweater left its bright mark: visual dissonance, token of doom, stain. There were few props in Bergen National Opera’s spellbinding semi-staging of Britten’s Peter Grimes at Usher Hall, conducted by Edward Gardner and performed by top soloists, led by Stuart Skelton, with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir, the Edvard Grieg Kor, the voices of Collegiûm Mûsicum and students from the Royal Northern College of Music. Already it has earned its place as a highlight of this year’s Edinburgh international festival.
Despite the huge forces required, this Peter Grimes was a model of economy. The prominence of that small knitted garment, made by the faithful Ellen Orford, worn by Grimes’s boy apprentice (11-year-old Samuel Winter), was one of many simple but devastating choices made by director Vera Rostin Wexelsen. The pared down production, first seen at Bergen international festival in May this year, fitted Usher Hall like a glove.
The chorus, wearing their own unobtrusive clothes, stacked themselves up behind the orchestra, in front of Usher Hall’s imposing organ pipes (installed in 1913, the year Britten was born). For the Sunday morning service in Act 2, they turned their backs on us to form a congregation, a pious flock shepherded by the egregious rector Rev Adams (James Gilchrist) and conducted by their own choir master, Håkon Matti Skrede. Usually heard as off-stage interjection, here the full-bodied hymns and responses took on insistent force. To the fore, Ellen Orford (Erin Wall, ardent and tender) notices a bruise on the boy’s neck and mourns its significance.
Skelton, who sang the title role at English National Opera with Gardner conducting in 2009, is still the Grimes of choice. His look of bewilderment, the way he covers his face with his great fist – a touch of the fevered Otello about him – suggests the character’s own unknowingness. Who is he, what are his desires, what drives his dangerous strength? With only one flicker of vocal hesitancy in an explosive, subtle and lyrical performance, Skelton drew us into his terrible isolation where others playing the role might repel us. Christopher Purves’s brilliantly nuanced Captain Balstrode, Susan Bickley’s ripe Auntie, Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s drug-crazed Mrs Sedley and a cast including Andrew Greenan, Marcus Farnsworth, Robert Murray and Barnaby Rea made up the first-rate ensemble. Vibeke Kristensen and Hanna Husáhr delighted as Auntie’s appalling, sex-crazed, blonde-bombshell nieces.
The evening belonged, too, to the Bergen Philharmonic and Gardner, since 2015 its chief conductor. It’s about time we saw this gifted opera conductor at Covent Garden, though he is clearly at one with his Norwegian players and long may that last. The warm string sound, beautifully alive in the Usher Hall acoustic, tossing and surging and shimmering in the four orchestral interludes, give this ensemble its heart and character. Brass seemed to snarl and glint in a manner rarely heard when the orchestra is in a theatre pit. There was nothing about this performance that failed to provoke pity or terror or both. The chorus’s shout of damnation (“Peter Grimes!”) chilled the blood: a crowd of fanatics whose contemporary echoes hardly need spelling out.
The night before, Gardner and the orchestra played a concert of Wagner’s Rienzi overture, Elgar’s Symphony No 1 and Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor. The Grieg, best known for its urgent solo opening, careering down the keyboard in virtuosic flourish, is one of Norway’s most famous exports – even if Grieg did acquire much of his musical identity in Germany. When a work reaches that level of fame, a certain weary resistance gets in the way. You forget why it’s so good. Paul Lewis, the inquisitive and perceptive soloist, reminded us. Taut rhythms, light and yearning nocturnal moods, delicate shifts of colour brought the work to sensuous light. Gardner and the Bergen musicians responded with equal sensitivity and, as in the Elgar, excellent solos and, as in the Wagner, audacious heft.
Whether a singer performs a recital with the score or not troubles some in the audience more than others. It can be a liberation for all. Two encores aside, the international superstar bass René Pape stood firmly behind a music stand for his Queen’s Hall programme with the responsive pianist Camillo Radicke. This Dresden-born duo had conceived a weighty programme of God and mortality: Beethoven’s Sechs Lieder von Gellert, Op 48, Dvorák’s Biblical Songs, Op 99 and Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. A lighter note – slightly, but hardly – was sounded in Roger Quilter’s luscious Three Shakespeare Songs, Op 6. When you know a performer is not going to gesticulate beyond turning a page, you feel at liberty to bury your head in the text and listen without distraction. Pape is certainly implacable, with scarcely a smile, even when his audience cheered and shouted for more. All is at the service of the music. No movement is wasted. The fiery furnace is within him. That’s fine by me.
Star ratings (out of 5)
Peter Grimes ★★★★★
Bergen Philharmonic/Gardner ★★★★
René Pape ★★★★
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