LONDON — No one cares about opera and ballet, the film actor Timothée Chalamet remarked recently, touching off an outsized debate among arts lovers. If he is right, someone forgot to tell London. Far from suggesting an art form in decline, the city offers a reminder that opera and orchestral music continue to command passionate audiences.
The British may have a reputation for emotional reserve, but little evidence of it could be found at either performance I attended. Unlike many American audiences, London concertgoers still resist the standing ovation, but they are more than capable of roaring their approval.
Perhaps we are living through a particularly rich period for the performing arts, though it is hard to recognize a golden age while inhabiting it. It certainly felt that way in London, where two performances of exceptional musical and dramatic power left little doubt that these traditions remain vibrantly alive.
If any work can lay claim to being the greatest opera of the 20th century, it may be Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes. Premiered in 1945, Britten’s bleak portrait of a fisherman persecuted by his neighbors remains unsettling because it resists easy judgments. Peter Grimes is neither hero nor villain but an outsider whose own flaws and violent impulses coexist uneasily with the cruelty and hypocrisy of the Borough. Britten’s superb score benefits from Montagu Slater’s poetic and often haunting libretto, adapted from George Crabbe’s long narrative poem, The Borough (1810).
The performances I attended recently — the Royal Opera’s Peter Grimes and an all-Wagner program by the London Symphony Orchestra — were sold out.
Britten’s opera asks difficult questions about community, conformity, and compassion, questions that seem no less urgent today than they were eight decades ago.
Indeed, the Royal Opera’s production, seen May 25, emphasized its relevance with scenic designer Michael Levine’s present-day setting in a struggling fishing town on the English coast. Luis F. Carvalho’s costumes were likewise contemporary — blue jeans were common attire. Deborah Warner’s staging captured both the work’s intimate human tragedy and its larger social implications.
British tenor Allan Clayton may be the Peter Grimes of his generation, dominating the role as Jon Vickers did in a previous era. Clayton has performed the role at the Metropolitan Opera and several other major opera houses. In this production, Clayton emphasized Grimes’ vulnerability more than his volatility — the opposite of Vickers’ portrayal, which I saw more than 40 years ago in a Houston Grand Opera production.
Clayton’s Grimes seems a victim of circumstances, a man caught up in forces beyond his control that leave him bewildered and drifting inexorably toward his doom. He has the strong dramatic voice that we’ve come to expect from those who take on the role, but he also retains the capacity for lyrical introspection in moments such as the aria “Now the Great Bear and Pleiades.”
Maria Bengtsson was a marvelous Ellen Orford, long-suffering as Grimes’ romantic interest but also fiercely protective of Grimes and the boy who comes into their lives. Her Act III aria, “Embroidery in Childhood,” was one of the evening’s emotional high points. While mending an apprentice’s jersey, Orford slowly comes to terms with Grimes’ mistreatment of the boy and with the futility of her own devotion. Bengtsson sang the scene with luminous tone and restrained anguish, making Orford’s painful loss of faith deeply moving.
With an assertive Orford and a vulnerable Grimes, this distinctly 21st-century reading seemed very much like a Grimes for our time. .
It was a delight to see the stentorian baritone Bryn Terfel in a familiar role — that of the kindly Captain Balstrode. The rest of the supporting cast was superb, especially in moments such as the poignant Act II quartet for four women reflecting on their difficult lives among the hard-hearted men in the Borough.
Peter Grimes is a great chorus opera, and the Royal Opera Chorus performed magnificently. I’ve never seen a more vivid and full-throated representation of mob violence on the operatic stage than in the scenes where the residents of the Borough mount a manhunt against Grimes. Their shouts of “Peter Grimes!” were hair-raising, with conductor Jakub Hrůša dramatically prolonging the sustained notes.
Another main protagonist of Peter Grimes is the orchestra. Britten’s writing evokes the sea in all its shifting moods — calm, mysterious, exhilarating, and terrifying. The Royal Opera Orchestra played with remarkable color and precision, with Hrůša maintaining balance between orchestra and singers while preserving the score’s dynamic momentum. The famous Sea Interludes glistened with detail without losing their cumulative impact.
Three nights later came an all-Wagner program by the London Symphony Orchestra under its conductor emeritus, Simon Rattle, featuring extended excerpts from Götterdämmerung. The program provided a strong argument for more concert performances of Wagner.
The German composer’s 100-piece orchestra sounded far more powerful on the Barbican stage, particularly with the venue’s “live” acoustics, than it does sequestered in an orchestral pit. The hammer blows and brass declamations in “Siegfried’s Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung, for example, were overwhelming in the best sense — splendidly grand and forceful.
Rattle shaped “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” with a Brucknerian sense of spaciousness, allowing Wagner’s radiant orchestral textures to unfold naturally. The LSO’s brass section was magnificent, while the strings imparted an exhilarating sense of forward motion as Siegfried embarked on his adventure.
American mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong brought a brightly burnished tone and riveting dramatic urgency to Waltraute’s plea to Brünnhilde. Her account of Wotan’s despair and Valhalla’s impending doom unfolded with the intensity of a self-contained music drama, supported by an orchestra that matched her every inflection.
A much-reduced orchestra provided a welcome interlude with the intimate Siegfried Idyll. Rattle drew orchestral playing of chamber-like delicacy, the woodwinds and solo strings phrasing lovingly in Wagner’s most tender score.
Concluding the concert, with the larger orchestra onstage, was Brünnhilde’s “Immolation Scene,” among the most demanding and exacting episodes in all opera. German-Italian dramatic soprano Anja Kampe (Rattle’s Brünnhilde in a Munich Ring) sang with vocal command and dramatic conviction. Kampe remained physically engaged in the music throughout the long scene, and if her voice at times lost focus in the higher reaches of her range, the performance overall, with Rattle’s expert partnership, remained thrilling. The piece ended in blazing grandeur.
What struck me most about both evenings was not simply the level of execution, extraordinary though it was, but the palpable engagement of audiences. These were not dutiful museum visits undertaken by aging devotees. The crowds included plenty of younger listeners, and the applause reflected genuine excitement.
