Opera
Peter Grimes
Sydney Symphony Orchestra
Opera House Concert Hall, July 25
★★★★★
In Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten and librettist Montagu Slater took George Crabbe’s poems about provincial severity and a cruelly tormented fisherman and turned them into an existential allegory.
Humanity is depicted huddled on a hostile coast, bound together as much by pettiness as love, drawing terror, sustenance and spirit from the great void of the sea, which is indifferent yet abundant, ferocious yet beautiful, unfathomable yet certain.
Stuart Skelton inhabits the role of Grimes with elemental power and intensity. Credit:Sim Canetty-Clarke
This concert performance by the SSO under conductor and artistic director David Robertson is a rare opportunity to hear a truly great Grimes in Australian tenor Stuart Skelton, magnificent co-principals in Nicole Car (Ellen) and Alan Held (Balstode) as the voices of forgiving love, and the superbly coloured splendour of the SSO in Britten’s orchestral interludes, which paint the sea in exquisite tones of eternal mystery.
Skelton inhabits this role with elemental power and intensity, its essence seeming to find tangible embodiment in the fabric of his voice. In Now the Great Bear and the Pleiades in Act I and in the Act II aria where he sings of his efforts to build a house of kinder ways, the sound was drawn to ethereal radiance, while in climactic moments his voice thunders with the surging power of the sea itself.
The hushed quiet and expressive nuance of his final soliloquy, backlit with delicate choral and orchestral colours, was quite devastating. Though Car might initially seem too young for the weary kindness of Ellen, in performance her voice had a wonderful mix of warmth and endearing colour in moments such as her grimly comforting Act 2 monologue with the apprentice John (Joshua Scott).
Held’s voice gave variegated grain and inner strength to the redoubtable decency and loyalty of Balstrode. As the hotelier Auntie, Deborah Humble and her two "nieces" Jacqueline Porter and Cleo Lee-McGowan created a texture of caressing complexity and warmth with Car in the quartet of Act 2.
Michael Honeyman as Ned Keane grew to a sound of rounded mahogany glow and Christopher Richardson had firm edge and projection as the lawyer Swallow. As the niggling gossip Mrs Sedley, Elizabeth Campbell sang with penetrating clarity and Jud Arthur portrayed the straightforward Hobson with firm even strength.
John Longmuir captured the weak hypocrisy of Reverend Evans with nervous insistence and Robert Macfarlane’s voice as Bob Boles blended in ensembles with rounded finish.
As the plain-clothed chorus lurking like a flash-choir in the organ gallery, Sydney Philharmonia Choirs created thrilling blended choral and orchestral colour in the climax of Act 3.
With large forces scattered across the entire hall, conductor David Robertson maintained cogent control and exhilarating precision in places of intricate complexity, harnessing a deeply inspiring range of timbre, texture and intensity to create a sense of the epic and dramatic involvement that never palled.
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