Peter Grimes, Royal Opera, Covent Garden, June 2011

Towards the end of Act III when Ellen Orford and Captain Balstrode find Grimes on his own, he covers his head with his coat, just as the apprentice did in Act II when Ellen tried to draw him out. This is a Grimes whose appalling lack of social skills render him easy meat for the inhabitants of The Borough, who can forget their differences by uniting against him, treating him as an unwanted outsider, and Ben Heppner played that part with consummate skill. I first saw him in this role in Chicago in 1997, and there is something touching about his lumbering clumsiness, his visionary dreams, his determined bloody mindedness and his singing of “What harbour shelters peace?”

Grimes enters the tavern in Act I, all photos by Clive Barda

Amanda Roocroft was simply wonderful as Ellen Orford, her voice as sure as the personality she inhabited on stage. The only woman who could really bring Peter out of his shell, she was so strong when she criticises him for “This unrelenting work, this grey unresting industry”. Yet even she cannot protect the boy — well played by Patrick Curtis — who looked to be no more than eleven years old. When the door to the tavern flies wide open for the second time in Act I the boy stands there alone, just as Grimes did earlier when he entered and stood in the open doorway singing, “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades …”. This powerful production by Willy Davis was extremely well revived by François de Carpentries, amply bringing out these high moments.

Act II, Grimes takes the apprentice off to work despite Ellen's pleas

Jonathan Summers gave a strongly sympathetic performance of Balstrode, and Roderick Williams performed well as the apothecary, Ned Keene. I would have preferred more spitefulness and edge from Jane Henschel’s Mrs. Sedley, who came over rather as an old fuss pot, but Catherine Wyn-Rogers was a fine Auntie, and Rebecca Botone and Anna Devin acted their hearts out as her nieces. Whenever they were on stage they were always near the centre of the action, and worked brilliantly well together.

Act III, The Borough prepare to march to Grimes's hut

The designs by John Macfarlane are plain but effective, well lit by David Finn. I love the opening of the set for the dawn music of the first sea interlude, and when Ned Keene breaks the tension in the Act I tavern scene with “Old Joe has gone fishing”, I love the direction that produces a dance in 7/4 time. This production brings out the horrid awkwardness of Grimes’s estrangement from the local community, eliciting our sympathy for him, and was powerfully supported by the orchestra and chorus under Andrew Davis’s direction.

Performances continue until July 3 — for details click here.

Le Grand Macabre, ENO, English National Opera, September 2009

This musical work by Ligeti (1923–2006) is related to opera in the way a painting by Hieronymus Bosch is related to a landscape. It seems to be about death, of both body and soul, but is a surreal work based on a 1934 drama La balade du Grand Macabre by Belgian author Michel de Ghelderode. The action takes place in a principality called Breughelland, named after the painter Pieter Brueghel, whose Triumph of Death seems to have been an inspiration. Ligeti originally wrote the music in 1975–77, collaborating on the libretto with Michael Meschke. It was written in German but intended to be flexible in its language and translated for performance. There was originally a fair amount of spoken dialogue, but much of this was removed in the revised version of 1996, which is what was performed here. Perhaps more should have gone, because some of the invective was unnecessarily unpleasant, including phrases such as ‘dog f…er’ and ‘arse l…er’. Is this really necessary in a work of art? Are there not other ways of expressing things that can carry the emotions by clever understatement? These particular phrases were uttered by the white minister and the black minister, who looked and performed like stock characters from a pantomime.

To understand this strange work I found it helpful to recall that Ligeti had shocking experiences as a young man. He was drafted into a Jewish labour battalion in 1944, and his close family was all sent to Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Only his mother survived. The central character of the opera is Death in the person of Nekrotzar, sung here by Pavlo Hunka. His slave Piet the Pot was sung by Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke, and the two lovers Amando and Amanda, who perpetually have sex together, were sung by Frances Bourne and Rebecca Botone. There is a court astronomer named Astradamors and his sadistic wife Mescalina, sung by Frode Olsen and Susan Bickley, and in the second part we meet Prince Go-Go, sung by counter-tenor Andrew Watts, and Gepopo, the chief of the secret police, sung by Susanna Anderson.

The action seems to lack a clear narrative, and I shall not go into a long exposition of the various scenes, but the production by Alex Ollé and Valentina Carrasco showed a variety of things going on, in and around a huge female corpse crouching on stage. The lighting by Peter van Praet was very clever as it threw some strange views on the corpse and even seemed to show its skeleton on occasion. Set designs were by Alfons Flores, and costumes, which I wasn’t wild about, by Lluc Castells. The production is being done jointly with the theatre La Monnaie in Brussels, the Gran Teatro del Liceu Barcelona, and the Teatro dell’ Opera di Roma. Baldur Brönnimann conducted and did a fine job with the orchestra. When I closed my eyes it sounded wonderful, but the grotesque action on stage was a distraction, and lovers of Ligeti might prefer a simple recording.