Customer Reviews

Britten: Peter Grimes ~ Pears / Britten

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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.

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.