You may well ask whether theartsdesk hasn’t already exhausted all there is to say about Glyndebourne’s most celebrated Britten production of recent years. I gave it a more cautious welcome than most on its first airing, troubled a little by the literalism of Michael Grandage’s production and the defects in all three principal roles. Alexandra Coghlan was more enthusiastic about this season’s revival but found one crucial shortcoming in Mark Padmore as Captain Vere, the god of the floating kingdom suffering a mortal blow when his repressed resident villain the Master at Arms John Claggart is struck dead by “good” handsome sailor Bllly Budd. Would the Albert Hall shift perspectives?
It did, and in the usual unexpected ways. Padmore, possessing the smallest of the three lead voices, projected best right to the back of the hall, where I was this time sitting, with crystal clear inflection and articulation of every phrase, making the most intimate moments the most telling. By which I mean the Prologue, in which Vere looks back on 1797 and his ship the HMS Indomitable’s role in the Napoleonic Wars, and the Epilogue, where he sees Billy’s sacrifice as his own personal – sexual, imply the librettist of the Melville story E M Forster and Britten – liberation. The big final major-key triad, heart-stopping from the London Philharmonic under Sir Andrew Davis, and its fade to nothing, the voice left alone and Padmore walking off to total silence, were as stunning a couple of moments as any in this year’s Proms operas.
If only what went before had been consistently up to that level. The big disappointment, in this venue at least, was Brindley Sherratt’s Claggart (pictured with Jacques Imbrailo's Billy to the left of the picture). No suggestion here of Forster’s “sexuality gone soggy”, and though Sherratt has always been a true bass, there was none of the inky-black resonances that had so cut through the Albert Hall murk in Eric Halfvarson’s and Stephen Milling's Ring giants and even the now-controversial Wagner performance of Sir John Tomlinson, the greatest of all Claggarts. Maybe Sherratt is more cut out to be a noble sort, as his peerless Pimen, Sarastro and Pogner have already proved.
The object of Claggart's self-thwarted desire was, as in 2010, the Billy of Jacques Imbrailo: a likeable chap with a lightish baritone, sweet but not even innocently sexy or especially charismatic. Waiting in the wings as it were was a singer with a bigger voice and presence, Duncan Rock, who along with Peter Gijsbertsen (both pictured left), made the soulful sax-dominated scene of the aftermath to the Novice’s flogging a strong one (Rock will be singing Tarquinius in Fiona Shaw’s hugely anticipated Glyndebourne Touring Opera production of The Rape of Lucretia).
The rest of the ensemble and the Glyndebourne Chorus were as strong as ever, making the best in the hall of the “moment we’ve been waiting for” in Act Two before mists obscure the enemy. I wavered about the wisdom of having Ian Rutherford’s re-staging done in costume; the evening dress of Justin Way’s Wagner operas had seemed more liberating. But the realism of the one-to-ones certainly worked. Again, the more intimate scenes in Vere’s cabin, with the back projection working especially well, came across the most vividly – though Padmore is still taxed to express extreme anguish: you expect the searing of a Langridge, whose voice Padmore’s so often resembles, or a Pears, but it falls just a little short.
Davis (pictured right) cut through the cotton wool of the Albert Hall to give incision at every turn of Britten's finely calibrated orchestral screw, with magnificent focus in all departments from scything LPO brass down to Debussyan flute and harp reflections, while never quite billowing in all but the last of the big moments. So fine an achievement in many ways, so clearly the fruit of long-term teamwork, but it could have been so much more devastating. Until, of course, the end.
- Listen to this Prom for the next six days on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer
- Preview of Glyndebourne's 2014 main season repertoire on the company's website
- Read theartsdesk's coverage of the Proms
- Read David Nice's blog, I'll Think of Something Later