Peter Grimes, Welsh National Opera review - febrile energy and rage

Emotions run high at WNO these days. When the company’s co-directors, Sarah Crabtree and Adele Thomas, feel impelled to take to the stage at the end of the first night of Peter Grimes, in front of the entire company, chorus, orchestra and all, you know that matters have reached a pass that only a massive show of enthusiastic solidarity can hope to assuage.

Enthusiasm there was in plenty: stamping and yelling, cheering and clapping from a packed house of opera-lovers young and old who plainly wanted it to be heard in the horrible Senned building next door that the Land of Song was still in good throat and strong in support of what still remains Wales’s finest man-made export – its extraordinary opera company.

It would have happened like this, I’m sure, even if Melly Still’s new staging of Britten’s masterpiece had been a flop. But of course it was not and is not. To say that there is an air of defiance about everything in the performance would be a gross understatement. The production has a ferocity, a kind of rage, that certainly derives from something in the work itself, but also surely expresses the anger of so many talented, committed musicians at the treatment being handed down to them by a cabal of philistine apparatchiks in Cardiff and London. Punches are thrown, bodies collide, even the new apprentice hits out at Grimes: even Ellen, the serene widowed schoolmistress, does so, uselessly, being half his size.  Under Tomáš Hanus the orchestral playing has an almost desperate, frenzied power, a febrile energy that left me, sitting comfortably in my stalls seat, mentally half-drained by the second interval. Britten himself put this into his score: Hanus didn’t invent it. Yet I can’t remember a storm interlude of such brazen violence or woodwind playing of quite such manic brilliance; or a Moonlight of such menacing intensity, in any previous Grimes, even the composer’s own. This was in every sense a tour de force.

As for the WNO chorus, is there anything new to say, beyond that I’m told less than half of Saturday’s line-up were still on contract? Grimes is of course one of the great choral operas; as in Mussorgsky the chorus is a living, breathing dramatis persona, not merely what Wagner memorably called “scenery that has learnt to march and sing.” Here Melly Still, instead of distributing them round the stage, giving them nets to fold, lines to bait, sails to mend, shamelessly lines them up, like a wall of protest and discontent – a pre-digital twittersphere – and has them sing their hearts out. It’s brilliant and frightening, and a lot too close to home.In general this is a production that lets the work speak, without clutter and with only the occasional intervention: the dead apprentice’s (or is it WNO's?) coffin dragged across the stage before the Prologue, his phantom appearance in Grimes’s hut, and again in the final scene, movingly, in the boat in which he died and that has hung like a sword of Damocles over the stage from the very beginning. Here and there dancing scene-shifters intrude, but discreetly, except in the pub scene, where they mastermind with the chorus a brilliant, Dali-esque manipulation of doors and windows blown by the gale. But the sea itself figures in Chiara Stephenson’s settings as sound and space, not water or waves. For the rest, the atmosphere is behavioural, which is more or less exactly what the opera is all about.

If there are occasional losers in all this, it is the solo voices, who have not only to sing through the blazing orchestral sound, but to place Britten’s tricky conversational fragments correctly within and around it. At the heart of the performance, however, Nicky Spence’s Grimes (pictured top, with Sally Matthews) sets standards not often heard, in my experience, since Pears – Vickers without the scoops and slithers, and with a fine lyrical head voice that speaks the tender poet behind the brutal exterior. His Great Bear monologue is good, but much more than good is his hut scene with the living and dead apprentices (Maya Marsh and, I’m guessing, Kim Noble), a masterpiece of emotional vacillation that says everything about Britten’s attraction to this complex and muddled character.The support, though, is variable. Sally Matthews’s Ellen, a shade too smart and pretty perhaps for a widowed schoolmistress on a mission of redemption, is vocally uneasy, the voice tending to spread round rather than focus on the note, strong at the high top that Britten rather cruelly demands, less steady below. David Kempster’s Balstrode has the right air of salty good sense and reassurance, and a strong presence in his long Act I interview with Grimes; Sarah Connolly is a solid Auntie with her two skittish “nieces”, Fflur Wyn and Eirey Price, both suitably vacuous; Dominic Sedgwick is a brisk, sensible Ned Keene, the good bloke who might or might not stick by you in a crisis; Catherine Wyn-Rogers gets the right tone for the curtain-twitching Mrs Sedley; Sion Goronwy is a loudly officious, coarsely licentious Swallow. (Pictured middle-page: Balstrode (David Kempster), the Nieces (Fflur Wyn and Eiry Price), and Auntie (Sarah Connolly))

They add up to a perfectly well-rounded set of types. But something in Ilona Karas’s costumes, circa 1970s or 80s, inhibits them as characters in Grimes’s world, a world of workhouses, carters and new Methodists like Bob Boles, a sharp, volatile, uninhibited portrait by Oliver Johnston (pictured above, with Dominic Sedgwick). It’s as if these excellent singers were sometimes unsure how to read their roles, so time-specific, out of time. 

A thrilling evening nonetheless, enjoyed by, among the rest of us, the Chairman of Arts Council England, Nicholas Serota, come, no doubt, to inspect the corpse. I fear that, like Grimes’s apprentice, it may haunt his dreams.

• Further performances of Peter Grimes at Wales Millennium Centre on 8 and 11 April, then Southampton, Birmingham, Milton Keynes and Plymouth
• More opera reviews on theartsdesk