Britten: Peter Grimes ~ Pears / Britten [Import]

Claire Watson (Artist), David Kelly (Artist), Geraint Evans (Artist), Iris Kells (Artist), James Pease (Artist), Jean Watson (Artist), John Lanigan (Artist), Benjamin Britten (Composer, Conductor), Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra Covent Garden (Orchestra) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Orchestra: Royal Opera House Chorus and Orchestra Covent Garden
• Conductor: Benjamin Britten
• Composer: Benjamin Britten
• Audio CD (February 26, 2001)
• SPARS Code: ADD
• Number of Discs: 2
• Format: Import
• Label: Decca Import
• ASIN: B000059ZIE
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #490,385 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

Disc: 1

1. Prologue. Peter Grimes

2. Prologue. You sailed your boat round the coast

3. Prologue. Peter Grimes, I here advise you!

4. Prologue. In truth... the pity... and the truth

5. Prologue. Interlude 1. On the beach

6. Act 1. Scene 1. Oh! hang at open doors the net, the cork

7. Act 1. Scene 1. Hi! Give us a hand!

8. Act 1. Scene 1. I have to go from pub to pub

9. Act 1. Scene 1. Let her among you without fault cast the first stone

10. Act 1. Scene 1. Look, the storm cone!

See all 26 tracks on this disc

Disc: 2

1. Act 2. Scene 1. We planned that their lives should have a new start

2. Act 2. Scene 1. Swallow! Shall we go and see Grimes in his hut?

3. Act 2. Scene 1. Now is gossip put on trial

4. Act 2. Scene 1. From the gutter, why should we trouble at their ribaldr

5. Act 2. Interlude 4. Passacaglia

6. Act 2. Scene 2. Go there!

7. Act 2. Scene 2. Now!... Now!...

8. Act 2. Scene 2. Peter Grimes! Nobody here?

9. Act 3. Interlude 5. Evening

10. Act 3. Scene 1. Assign your prettiness to me

See all 34 tracks on this disc

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great Peter Grimes, but no longer absolute, February 19, 2006

By 

Santa Fe Listener (Santa Fe, NM USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Britten: Peter Grimes ~ Pears / Britten (Audio CD)

The already excellent sonics on Decca's 1958 Peter Grimes have been refurbished in this two-fer issued in 1999. It's a great bargain now, and a classic performance, of course, with inspired conducting from Britten himself, stressing the chamber quality of his orchestratoin. But the intervening years have brought quite a few more versions equally excellent in one way or another. Colin Davis re-thought the opera completely in his famous set on Philips, making Grimes more tormented and elemental; he was hugely aided by Jon Vickers' primoridal portrayal of a brutal, enigmatic, and haunted hero.

Peter Pears created the role, and the excerpts he recorded for EMI in 1948 are definitive; here, only ten years later, his vocal powers are noticeably reduced, and there is a marked absence of inner torment and outwardly expressed anguish. Throughout the text runs a haunting but perplexing homoerotic theme, which Pears interprets sympatehtically. It's as if his shy, poetic Grimes can only relate to his apaprenntice boys, and their doom is symbolic of the doom faced by any man who is attracted, however innocently, to youths--this was a problem that Britten himself wrestled with in his personal life. On a simpler social level, Pears sings with a marked upper-class accent quite foreign to an illiterate fisherman. It signals a hint of poetic nobility, which was the general thrust of Pears's interpretation.

Later performers see the role more grimly as a half-crazy antisocial misfit, torn by his inability to resist violence, fighting tto relate to Ellen but failing because of nameless inner demons. There's not much of that in the Pears/Britten conception; the composer hated Vickers' anguished Grimes so much that he walked out on it. I think everyone who loves this opera should own both interpretations, yet there's no doubt that Britten's conducting remains definitive.

P.S. 2011 - In his acclaimed book n 20th entury music, The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross devotes considerable space to Peter Grimes and reveals, with convincing quotations, that the original libretto was filled with more homoeroticism than the published version, which was skewed toward the leftist political position that Grimes is the victim of the Borough's prejudice, acting as an Un-Anglican Activities committee. I think the uneasy merging of two different thrusts led to the troubling ambiguity that hovers over Grimes in the opera house.

5.0 out of 5 stars still definitive - but not the only view, November 16, 2007

By 

Alan Montgomery "Opera lover" (Oberlin, Oh USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Britten: Peter Grimes ~ Pears / Britten (Audio CD)

I love this recording. The atmospheric interludes are brilliantly handled by composer/ conductor Britten. Pears is strangely controversial. While his voice quality per se and accent don't bother me, his diction at times gets very mushy, and that DOES. Claire Watson makes Ellen Orford into a wonderfully simple and effective anchor for Peter Grimes - one he can't reach out to. James Pease's Balstrode is wise and sympathetic to Peter. But the entire cast is fabulous. It was a Decca/London triumph all around, and for that we can only say: Wow!

Yes, there are other recordings and other views of the opera. And some other Britten conducted performances are far less well prepared than this (the ALBERT HERRING in the series suffers from some very inaccurate singing in principle roles). But this is a treasure.