Product Details

• Actors: Alan Opie, Jean Rigby, John Graham-Hall
• Format: Classical, Color, DVD, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Studio: Kultur Video
• DVD Release Date: July 26, 2005
• Run Time: 150 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B0009WIDXA
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #119,469 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Albert Herring, Benjamin Britten's comic opera which is gently laced with moments of farce, is a jocular parody on life in East Suffolk at the turn of the 20th century. It is a quaint, nostalgic journey to a bygone England and the journey has come full circle back to Glyndebourne where this piece was premiered in 1947. A Suffolk man himself, Sir Peter Hall returned triumphantly to his roots in this lovingly recreated production which leads us through the tale of Albert - a gullible, naïve greengrocer lad who, much to his embarrassment is made Village May King when it is realised there are no longer any girls with the necessary virtuous qualifications. The ensuing antics are brilliantly characterised by a strong British cast in this production, which is infused with freshness and limitless charm. Glyndebourne Festival Opera and soloists from the London Philharmonic conducted by Bernard Haitink, with John Graham-Hall, Patricia Johnson, Alan Opie, Felicity Palmer and Jean Rigby.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars GEM OF A PERFORMANCE, October 29, 2005

By 

Klingsor Tristan (Suffolk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Britten - Albert Herring / Graham-Hall, Rigby, Opie, Kern, Palmer, Johnson, Gale, Van Allan, Hammond-Stroud, Haitink, Glyndebourne Opera (DVD)

This is a performance of Albert Herring in the opera house for which it was conceived. That first performance was nearly sixty years ago now and, in the wrong production, Eric Crozier's comedy can feel a bit arch and dated these days, even if Britten's musical wit stands up a little better. Let's face it, Albert is a wimp and one night's binge drinking (pace Mr. Blair) ain't necessarily going to change that. What's more - again in the wrong hands - Loxford can end up as a village entirely populated by caricatures, real E.F.Benson Land.

Sir Peter Hall's, however, are the right hands. Maybe it's because he's an East Anglian boy himself and remembers these people, maybe it's just his wealth of theatrical experience, but he never allows his singers to overact or indulge in sending their characters up. The humour in these characters works best if they're left to hang themselves. So the Vicar mouths his platitudes with total conviction; the Mayor, a mere tradesman, struggles to maintain his dignity among his social superiors; the school-teacher is desperate for praise and for people to see how much good influence she has had over her pupils, past and present; the intimidating Lady Billows is here more a character from Saki than from Punch. Most importantly, in the last act everyone takes the presumed death of Albert absolutely seriously. His Mum (Patricia Kern) really becomes a moving, almost tragic figure in her loss. The wonderful Threnody is played, acted and sung straight and works all the better for it. It's only when Albert himself bursts in on the end of it that the retrospective irony becomes clear. Before that, it is as it should be - a genuinely moving moment.

Britten's music is wonderfully inventive and genuinely witty. He was always a master of pastiche (think of the Frank Bridge Variations or the Pyramus & Thisbe play in the Dream - or, in more serious vein, his assimilation of the Balinese gamelan in The Prince of the Pagodas and the Russian Kontakion in the Third Cello Suite). In Albert Herring you'll find witty send-ups of vacuous hymn-tunes that perfectly match Mr. Gedge's platitudes, of Victorian drawing-room ballads (`Is Albert virtuous...'), not to mention the wry Tristan spoofs as Albert drinks his `potion' or wallows in his tipsy `dementia' back home afterwards. But you'll also find masses of examples of Britten's ability to conjure magic from his limited group of instrumentalists. The Interlude between the Mayday Festival and Albert's tipsy arrival home, for example, is another of those uniquely evocative Britten nocturnes, comparable with those in The Rape of Lucretia before it and The Turn of the Screw after - the flute turns the horn's brash fanfare from the Festival into a beautiful starlit rhapsody, and the other woodwind combine to magical effect. Throughout, Bernard Haitink is at the helm of his London Philharmonic soloists and singers, producing as great a sense of ensemble in the musical performance as Sir Peter Hall does in the acting. Among all his other attributes, Haitink is a fine if unsung conductor of Britten's music (witness his Peter Grimes), continuing a tradition among Concertgebouw conductors and bringing a refreshing foreigner's perspective to this English music much as he has for Vaughan Williams' symphonies.

All the singers fully live up to their conductor's and director's demands. Outstanding among the village dignitaries are Hammond-Stroud's Vicar (demonstrating, as he always did, that it is possible to combine precise diction with a firm musical line and strong characterisation) and Elizabeth Gale's fluttering Miss Wordsworth. Felicity Palmer has provided us with many great performances late in her career (Klytemnestra, Fricka, Madame de Croissy, etc.). As Florence Pike here, she catches perfectly the social ambitions and frustrations of Lady Billows' housekeeper. Patricia Johnson as her Ladyship is much more than a figure of fun: her notions of good deeds and her prurience drive her to ride roughshod over anyone that gets in her way: she is a really intimidating figure and she sings the part even better than the great Sylvia Fisher. But the cornerstone of this performance is John Graham-Hall's definitive Albert. This was never one of Pears' better parts - while written, as ever, ideally for his voice, the character never really suited him. Graham-Hall catches it all, the wide-eyed innocence, the frustrations, the sexual ache, the defiance and the final triumph as he dispenses Mum and even Lady Billows on their way. Maybe he did steal Nancy away from Sid in the end. And his singing is excellent, too, whether in recitative or in Albert's yearning lyrical phrases (`It seems as clear as clear can be...'). His tipsy scene in the shop after his Coronatium is a triumph.

Hall directs his own production for TV with an admirable focus on character. He is confident enough in his singers' acting abilities to use a lot of close-up. The sets are ideal (Lady Billows' front room bears an uncanny resemblance to Glyndebourne's Organ Room) and the lighting suitably atmospheric whether sunny or rainy, daytime or nightime. If I have one criticism it is that the recorded balance is a bit singer-heavy, sometimes drowning Britten's magical instrumentation. Nevertheless, this is a gem of a performance and highly recommended.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a lot of fun!, August 30, 2006

By 

George B. Laurent "gblopera" (florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Britten - Albert Herring / Graham-Hall, Rigby, Opie, Kern, Palmer, Johnson, Gale, Van Allan, Hammond-Stroud, Haitink, Glyndebourne Opera (DVD)

This is an excellent production of a most amusing comic opera. In my opinion it is the most "accessible" of Britten's operas so even if you are not a Britten fan, I urge you to try it. The one problem I have with the production is that to get the full benefit of the comedy one needs subtitles (as do most operas in English). I have the video but I am now going to buy the DVD which, thank God, is subtitled!

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As Fine a Performance ..., February 16, 2011

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Britten - Albert Herring / Graham-Hall, Rigby, Opie, Kern, Palmer, Johnson, Gale, Van Allan, Hammond-Stroud, Haitink, Glyndebourne Opera (DVD)

... as I can imagine of this 1947 comic opera that has never thoroughly captured a spot in the repertoire of opera companies. It's a 1985 studio production, not a film of a staging, though based on a stage production at Glyndebourne. That's for the better, I suspect, as it allows for more intimate cinematic camera work and better exploration of the visual frame, the quaint dowdy village in East Suffolk where the naive goody-goody Albert is unsettled to find himself declared "King of the May." Tenor John Graham-Hall sings Albert, and he's spot-perfect in the role; he looks the part, he sounds the part, and he acts the part so artfully broadly that I suppose he has stage experience in productions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

The committee of village big shots -- Lady Billows, the vicar, the school marm, the police superintendent -- must all have been borrowed from the vaudeville or Gilbert/Sullivan stages; they're bizarrely eccentric, more so than mere cosmetics could render them. Gilbert's Mum is another grotesque figure, while his sly friend Sid has the voice and manner of an operetta star pasted all over him. This is in essence a Gilbert and Sullivan scenario, as corny as any Broadway Musical staged in the lifetime of Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), but with "avant-garde" modernist music ...

... and I confess that I don't like the mix. Honestly, I don't like this opera at all; my five-star rating is simply a recognition of the quality of the performance. I have no intention of ever sitting through "Albert Herring" again. If I take it as a musical comedy, if I match it against the sparkling wit of the librettos of Gilbert & Sullivan, it seems clunky and dispirited. The unrelenting tetrameter couplets, with their pretentious off-rhymes, annoy me so much that I wish the singers would switch to Gaelic so that I wouldn't understand them. The humor is lame and thin in comparison to HMS Pinafore, South Pacific, yes even Mamma Mia. The script and the dramaturgy improve from the middle of the second act to the end, but by then it's too late not to give the impression that this opera is more a cultural duty than a pleasure to see and hear.

And the music? There's no question that Britten was a brilliant composer. The orchestral structures of this opera are masterfully crafted. (This recording, however, is balanced improperly in favor of the singers, whose voices often cover the orchestra rather than melding into an orchestral ensemble.) But the music goes nowhere, or rather it goes everywhere without charting any course; it's one damned cleverness after another. The disastrous weakness of this and most of Britten's operas, however, is the awkward, arbitrary, canto-blunto vocal writing. I don't demand that modern opera vocal lines be beautiful, elegant, pyrotechnic, melodic, enchanting, etc. -- all the qualities of operatic singing from Monteverdi to Janacek -- but if they're not THAT, then what are they supposed to be? I'd say that we're left with the choice that they should be "expressive" above all. The only Britten opera, as far as I've heard, in which the vocal lines are powerfully expressive is "Peter Grimes." The best that can be said about the vocal lines of "Albert Herring" is that they are quirky.