#petergrimes

[tibitabi]

PeterGrimes Interlude II: STORM from Tabea Rothfuchs on Vimeo.

[musicaespansiva]

Singing 10, Looks 3

Tonight was Peter Grimes at the Met.  The cast is generally excellent, especially Allan Clayton as Grimes.  I didn’t see him in Hamlet last season, but here is outstanding -- a tortured, confused, and lost Grimes.  Not so much the monstrous force of nature like Vickers, but far more unknowing than Pears.  And perhaps autistic, in that he doesn’t really understand the emotional responses he elicits, so he lashes out or turns away from people.  His mad scene feels real.

Nicole Carr is fine as Ellen, but it’s really a two person show here -- Adam Plachetka as Balstrode really dominates every scene that doesn’t contain Grimes.  And of course, the orchestra and chorus are fantastic.

And then there’s this set.  Uggh.  Drab, dull & cramped in a way that a provincial English village isn’t.  Director John Doyle doesn’t use the space at all -- the distance of the backwall from the front of the stage is directly proportional to the number of people on stage.  To make sure our attention is focused, he needs to telegraph to who’s singing by using Laugh-in style windows. He doesn’t trust us to understand the relationships amongst the characters -- he only shows us the exact people who are interacting.  (This especially makes the opening of Act III confusing -- how would anyone know there are two pubs across from each other here that people are migrating between -- I wouldn’t.)  The most effective scenes are when a) he gets that damn backwall out of sight (for one of the final choral scenes when the chorus is screaming out “Peter Grimes”), and when it closes in tight on mad Peter.  But the high-arching walls always make it feel artificial and stylized.  And you almost wonder when that backwall comes forward, if it will push the singers into the pit.  It feels like type of staging & set might work if it were a fast-paced musical, but it’s not -- it’s an opera, so this staging just drags.

9 November 2022, Met Opera, Peter Grimes

[knittingkonrad]

In the meantime! 🎼 #petergrimes at @staatstheater_augsburg 🎭 #theater #opera #oper #staatstheater #staatstheateraugsburg #augsburg #augsburg #augsburgcity #augsburgstadt #benjaminbritten (hier: Augsburg, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CeT3LeQoSL4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[aniketosomina]

In the footsteps of Benjamin Britten and MR James: a walk round Aldeburgh and a visit to the Red House, the home Britten shared with his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, for the last twenty years of his life. It is a town saturated with the strangeness, mystery and elemental danger of the sea; it was all too easy to imagine the frantic flight of the foolhardy archaeologist Paxton along the shingle from the Bear Inn (the White Lion, now a hotel) to the Martello tower where he met his gruesome and lonely end in one of James's greatest stories, A Warning to the Curious (memorably filmed in 1972 by Lawrence Gordon Clark, but filmed, strangely, in Norfolk). Britten's Red House felt, by contrast, a place of safety, a peaceful art and book-lined sanctuary (the likes of Arthur Machen, Denton Welch and Walter de la Mare occupy the shelves), a light-filled house still tinged with the warmth and cheer of Britten's many friends and visitors (there was sadness too: the upstairs bedroom in which he died was especially moving). I liked the shelves of knick-knacks and postcards, art that ran the gamut from from the kitsch to the darkly sublime, and the carefully preserved traces of domesticity as well as musical inspiration. At the end of our trip I couldn't resist: we went back down to the beach and I stood, with Maggi Hambling's Scallop at my back, facing out to the North Sea, into the teeth of the wind, and listened to Britten's Sea Interludes (visions of Dunwich and church bells submerged beneath the waves, the weightless skimming of a gull along the surface of the waters, defying the buffeting winds and the fierce current that drags men and boats under, the sun fighting to break through the blanket of grey cloud, shades of Paxton, Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, Gustav von Aschenbach...) It was some moment. #mrjames #montaguerhodesjames #awarningtothecurious #aldeburgh #seaburgh #martellotower #aldeburghbeach #ghoststories #buriedcrown #threecrownsofeastanglia #benjaminbritten #theredhouse #peterpears #johnpiper #maggihambling #scallop #aldeburghbookshop #seainterludes #petergrimes #dunwich #sunkenchurches #drownedbells #theseathesea #thalattathalatta https://www.instagram.com/p/B1W7qfegIyh/?igshid=yhgcbi9h9jph

[hattydaze]

The Scallop: I hear those voices that will not be drowned #maggihambling #petergrimes #britten #aldeburgh #sculpture #beach #suffolk #publicart #thescallop #sea

[njcollinsimages-blog]

#booksigning #royalopera #openhouse #lovelondon #londoner #beautifullondon #architecturelovers #englisharchitecture #terrace #sunshine #londonfromabove #londonviews #Mesmerising #bookstagram #alifeforart #onlyartists #shakespeare #acting #buckinghampalace #stuartskelton #chrisaddison #bbcradio #bbcsounds #bbc #princecharles #roh #diewalkure #siegmund #petergrimes #tristanandisolde (at Royal Opera House) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bpu7Q2ZAhXR/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ot59el8c94xf

[thedopesoprano-blog-blog]

Spent the afternoon in between 3/1, 4/2 & 7/1 with Britten. #PeterGrimes