Hunger and starvation is increasing everyday

The Royal Opera House’s 2008 production of Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel makes no concessions to the idea that this is a sort of operatic Nutcracker to be staged for the kiddies at Christmas. Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser’s production is firmly in the grim, and Grimm, tradition of central European folk tales and it’s sung in German.

For Act 1, designer Christian Fernouillet has created a claustrophobic bedroom with surfaces at odd angles in which the children (Angelika Kirschlager and Diana Damrau) play out their hunger displacement games until their angry mother (Elizabeth Connell) sends them off to forest to gather berries. The father (Thomas Allen) returns with food and this relief from hunger is played out in a scene heavy with sexual innuendo between mother and father. It’s quite creepy. Finally they realise that the children are missing and set off in search.

Act 2 starts in a classic fairy tale forest which rapidly darkens into a place of real menace. The sandman (Pumeza Matshikiza) is a strange distorted creature who puts the children to sleep. In the dream sequence the fourteen guardian angels, with animal heads, carry in a bunch of furniture, including a fireplace, to create a fireside scene of bourgeois domesticity. Two of the animal angels reveal themselves as the mother and father and give the children gifts. Inside each elaborate package is a single sandwich which is devoured with rapt concentration.

Act 3 opens with the Dew Fairy, here a pink confection played by Anita Watson, waking the children. The witch (Anja Silja), a vicious looking old woman with comedy breasts and a Zimmer frame, leaves a miniature gingerbread house for the children to explore. This transforms to the full size version with dead children hanging in a glass fronted cupboard and industrial scale ovens for the witch’s child based confectionery experiments. There is no concession whatever to comedy. The witch is scary as all hell and the scene in which she is shoved in the oven involves some serious pyrotechnics. The conventional happy ending descends into an orgy of face stuffing as the revived children fall on the cake/corpse of the witch. The production is consistent in its essential seriousness and is supported by fine acting across the board. In line with the concept nobody camps up their part. It’s all in earnest.

Musically it’s a really strong performance. Both Kirschlager and Damrau are quite excellent and work really well together. Kirschlager has quite a rich tone which blends nicely with Damrau’s cleaner sound. Thomas Allen is also really good. He’s quite chilling in the Hexenritt for example. Anja Silja’s Witch is a tour de force. She is every inch the witch/hag of nightmares without descending into cheap vocal trickery. Matshikiza sings very sweetly. Connell and Watson are quite good too but didn’t really register strongly with me. Colin Davis gets a suitably Wagnerian sound out of the orchestra and seems to balance drama and beauty very nicely. He’s well supported by the ROH orchestra, especially the brass and woodwinds, and the Tiffin Boys’ Choir and Children’s Chorus. The sheer beauty of the piece really comes out in the finale with Erlöst, befreit, für alle Zeit which manages to be gorgeous while avoiding dipping into excessive sentimentality.

The video direction of Sue Judd is good. She isn’t fixated with close ups though, since this isn’t a terribly busy production, she brings the camera in when there’s not much else to watch. There aren’t any gimmicks and it’s a good approximation to how one would watch from a decent seat which is what video directors ought to give us. The sound and picture quality are very good. It was shot in 1080i and the DVD picture is generally crisp and clear. The DTS 5.1 soundtrack is absolutely first class; vivid and with spatial depth and everything clearly located. The PCM stereo isn’t quite as good. This may or may not be available on Blu-Ray as well. The Opus Arte website doesn’t mention it but Amazon in the US and Canada claim to have it. Audio choices there are LPCM 2.0 and 5.1. Subtitle options are English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. There’s a useful “Making of” documentary, an interview with Colin Davis plus cast and synopsis material on the disks. The package includes an unusually lavish tri-lingual leaflet.

I hesitate to compare this with the roughly contemporary Metropolitan Opera version. They are very different but both worthwhile in their own way.

Four decades of Peter Grimes

Having now had a chance to watch and review all five currently available video recordings of Peter Grimes I thought I might do a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of each. All of them have some merit and I doubt that there would be consensus on a “winner”. Anyway, here goes…

BBC film 1969
Grimes – Peter Pears
Conductor – Benjamin Britten
Director – Joan Cross & Brian Large

This is an essential historical document with both composer and the creator of the role involved. The production is straightforward and naturalistic. The sound and video quality is surprisingly good for the period. It does, though, leave one with the feeling that there is more to the role of Grimes than Pears finds.

Royal Opera House 1981
Grimes – Jon Vickers
Conductor – Colin Davis
Director – Elijah Moshinsky

Also a historical landmark being the first major production where Grimes wasn’t sung by Peter Pears. It has the excellent Heather Harper as Ellen Orford. The production is quite dull and very dimly lit. Vickers’ Grimes is controversial. In places he sounds fantastic and in others sorely taxed. His acting is oddly stilted. Norman Bailey fails to convince as Balstrode.  Sound and picture quality are OK.

English National Opera 1994
Grimes – Philip Langridge
Conductor – David Atherton
Director – Tim Albery

This is the production with most sense of the sea as a character brought out through innovative use of video projection. Langridge’s Grimes is intense, convincing and beautifully sung. Alan Opie is a very strong Balstrode. Unfortunately the orchestra and chorus aren’t up to rival versions and all aspects of the DVD; video direction, sound quality and picture quality are rather poor.

Opernhaus Zürich 2005
Grimes – Christopher Ventris
Conductor – Franz Welser-Möst
Director – David Pountney

This is a very fine and thought provoking production with any number of magical moments. Ventris is a first class Grimes combining power and sensitivity and the supporting performances all have merit, save perhaps for Alfred Muff’s sub-par Balstrode. The orchestra and chorus are quite superb. The performance gets a thoroughly sympathetic treatment on DVD with good video directing backed up by quite excellent sound and picture quality.

Metropolitan Opera 2008
Grimes – Anthony Dean Griffey
Conductor – Donald Runnicles
Director – John Doyle

This is a rather dull and dark production given a very eccentric treatment by the video director. Dean Griffey is a lyrical and sympathetic Grimes well backed up by the supporting cast, especially Anthony Michaels-Moore as Balstrode and Teddy Tahu-Rhodes as Ned Keene. The orchestra and chorus are excellent and Runnicles is fairly convincing though the first act drags a bit. The sound and picture quality is excellent.

The other Grimes

When the Royal Opera House mounted a new production of Britten’s Peter Grimes in 1975 with Canadian heldentenor Jon Vickers in the title role it was controversial. Whatever else one could say about it Vickers’ interpretation of Grimes was very different from that of Peter Pears for whom the part was written. Britten, it was said, hated it. I saw it that summer and was pretty impressed but then seventeen year olds impress easily. I certainly never expected that the young baritone singing Ned Keene would end up as a knight and Chancellor of the university where I began my degree a few weeks later. When the production was revived in 1981 there were some significant cast changes. Norman Bailey had replaced the retired Geraint Evans as Balstrode, Philip Gelling was in for Thomas Allen as Ned Keene and one John Tomlinson had taken over as Hobson the carter. The incomparable Heather Harper remained as Ellen Orford. It’s the revival cast that was recorded and broadcast by the BBC and which is available on DVD from Kultur in the Americas and Warner Video elsewhere.

For review purposes I watched this on the commercial VHS that was available in the early 1990s. The picture will obviously be better on the DVDs though I don’t suppose it will be a whole lot better than average TV, at least on the Kultur release. The stereo sound on the tape is pretty good and unless some fancy enhancing has happened (most unlikely with Kultur) one gets OK 1980s stereo but nothing fancy.

Elijah Moshinsky’s production is dark. Dark as in low light levels as opposed to extra pessimistic. If I hadn’t seen this in the theatre I’d think it was a function of it being an old VHS recording but I clearly remember how hard it was to see much on stage even from the Orchestra Stalls. The palette is greys, blacks and browns with only the nieces permitted a splash of muted colour. It’s also period and naturalistic which works pretty well. At least we are clearly in a fishing village by the sea. In my opinion the sea matters in Peter Grimes. The music tells us that but it’s more than that. Anyone who knows the east coast generally, and Suffolk in particular, knows how land and sea and light shape everything. Don’t believe me? Go look at a Turner. When the sea vanishes from the drama it loses a certain sense of menace (one of the main weaknesses of the recent Met production). Where Moshinsky maybe misses a trick is in not making more of the orchestral interludes. It’s only in the first and last that anything happens on stage (another problem with the Met production). Moshinsky also doesn’t pull any punches in his take on the nieces. No ambiguity here. They are prostitutes. All in all, for its era, the production holds up pretty well.

Musically there’s a lot to like too. For me, the highlight is Heather Harper’s Ellen Orford. She has a gorgeous voice and acts extremely well. “Embroidery in childhood was a luxury in idleness” is poignant almost beyond belief. Forbes Robinsom makes more of Swallow than most of his rivals and most of the other minor roles are fine. Colin Davis gets some really intense playing out of the orchestra. His tempi are quite extreme. In places he’s really quick but, especially when Grimes is singing, he slows right down. I timed the short third act at eight minutes slower than Runnicles. All in all though it’s a very good piece of conducting. I have reservations about Norman Bailey’s Balstrode. Maybe the voice is too dark for the music. I’m not sure but he doesn’t dominate the stage like some of his rivals. Frankly he’s best in the spoken dialogue in Act 3 Scene 2.

Then there’s Vickers. The conventional wisdom is that Vickers gives us “brutal Grimes” as against Pears’ more lyrical version. It’s not that simple. Vickers’ Grimes is far from one dimensional. Sure he can be brutal but he can quite gentle too. His “In dreams I’ve built myself some kindlier home” is quite heartbreaking, the more so as it comes just a couple of minutes before all his dreams are dashed for good. He also comes across as quite mad and broken but not brutal in “Grimes! Steady. There you are. Nearly home.” When he is brutal, he’s very brutal and the contrast is reinforced by the voice. Most of Grimes more sympathetic music is cruelly high for Vickers and part of the pathos lies in his struggle to sing it at all (which he barely does with “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades”) whereas Grimes at his most brutal allows Vickers to unleash a power and volume quite beyond the likes of Pears or Langridge. Vickers acting is a bit odd too. He shambles at times like a rather drunk grizzly bear and at other times he strikes almost baroque poses. That aspect of his interpretation doesn’t really convince me. Still, I doubt there’s a definitive take on Grimes. It’s too great and too complex for that. I think Vickers’ take is valid and well worth watching as well as being a landmark in the development of the role.

The video/broadcast was directed by John Vernon. Considering this is television in 1981 I’m not complaining too much. It’s mostly shot in closeup but he does give us setting shots, especially when it really matters like the start of Act 3 Scene 2. The VHS doesn’t have subtitles which is a bit of a drag (though this may have been fixed on the DVD releases).

This is an important landmark in the history of productions of Peter Grimes and this recording is a useful record of that.

Here’s the Youtube version of “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades”. Note the abrupt change of volume and mood as soon as the really high passage is over.