Grimes Ahoy
[The entire university network went down around 2 this afternoon without any estimate of when it'll be back up, so I'm home early.--ed.]
Monday night I ducked down into NYC for the final performance of Peter Grimes at the Met. Holy everything, is that ever a good opera. I bought a standing-room ticket, for the very back of the orchestra section. Unfortunately, the orchestra sound was a bit distant, and moreover, the balcony overhang meant that you couldn't see the top 1/3 of John Doyle's vertically oriented stage design. (Doyle was the brain behind the recent Sweeney Todd and Company revivals on Broadway.) The staging involves a large wall with windows at various heights; see here for photo.
If the Met's architecture worked against me there, it made up for it after the first act, if indirectly. See, the back rooms of the Met are so poorly ventilated that frequent performers there suffer allergies from them. This put comp tickets in the hands of at least one particular allergist with operatic patients; I didn't meet the allergist, but I met the allergist's friend, a kind 50ish woman who plucked me at random out of the standing room during the 1st intermission and asked if I wanted to sit, since the allergist evidently goes to sleep early and never watches more than one act of a comp-ticket opera. So I saw Act II and Act III from the center of the orchestra section, Row T, which is basically as good a seat for opera as you're going to find without flying to Europe. God, is the sound ever good from center orchestra.
The show was a knockout; Anthony Dean Griffey sang the title role commandingly, and the surrounding cast inhabited its seaside-villager roles with uncanny personality. The chorus and orchestra were both phenomenal. The staging has gotten mixed reviews, but I liked it a lot: subtly claustrophobic, snappily up-to-date yet evocative of the 19th-century seaside setting, and emotionally cool enough to let the music & drama resonate in it.
I don't have a lot of unobvious things to say about Peter Grimes itself, but it's easily the most dramatically effective opera I know (pitched with realistic emotion; legitimately psychologically ambiguous; paced impeccably) and musically it hits that 20th-century sweet spot where lyrical expressivity and disjointed abstraction meet. I've never been a huge opera fan, and experiencing one that feels emotionally authentic is a rare thing for me. Grimes's final mad scene and the following choral epilogue (which, tidelike, pulls the first Sea Interlude & chorus music back in) are devastating.
I love the orchestral passacaglia towards the end, where the undergirding theme (from the townspeople's gossip: "Grimes is at his exercise") goes metrically out of sync with the increasingly impassioned music layered above it in longer, more urgent phrases. It's like a shard of something with flames licking off of it, blown into a larger fire: social judgment kindled into tragedy, the whole theme of the opera transformed into wordless music. (I love how this subverts the baroque form, too: the bass line, though unchanging, is no stable element here.) The Sea Interludes, which are frequently performed as a stand-alone set by orchestras, were as gripping as ever, even if opera-goers tend not to be shy about coughing when no one is singing.
In the Lincoln Center subway stop after the show, someone (maybe a Juilliard kid?) was playing flute licks from the first Sea Interlude. I was feeling haunted enough to get on the uptown 1 train by mistake without noticing for a couple of stops.
There's a nice long chapter on Britten and Peter Grimes in Alex Ross's book, which you should read if you're at all interested in classical music.
Monday night I ducked down into NYC for the final performance of Peter Grimes at the Met. Holy everything, is that ever a good opera. I bought a standing-room ticket, for the very back of the orchestra section. Unfortunately, the orchestra sound was a bit distant, and moreover, the balcony overhang meant that you couldn't see the top 1/3 of John Doyle's vertically oriented stage design. (Doyle was the brain behind the recent Sweeney Todd and Company revivals on Broadway.) The staging involves a large wall with windows at various heights; see here for photo.
If the Met's architecture worked against me there, it made up for it after the first act, if indirectly. See, the back rooms of the Met are so poorly ventilated that frequent performers there suffer allergies from them. This put comp tickets in the hands of at least one particular allergist with operatic patients; I didn't meet the allergist, but I met the allergist's friend, a kind 50ish woman who plucked me at random out of the standing room during the 1st intermission and asked if I wanted to sit, since the allergist evidently goes to sleep early and never watches more than one act of a comp-ticket opera. So I saw Act II and Act III from the center of the orchestra section, Row T, which is basically as good a seat for opera as you're going to find without flying to Europe. God, is the sound ever good from center orchestra.
The show was a knockout; Anthony Dean Griffey sang the title role commandingly, and the surrounding cast inhabited its seaside-villager roles with uncanny personality. The chorus and orchestra were both phenomenal. The staging has gotten mixed reviews, but I liked it a lot: subtly claustrophobic, snappily up-to-date yet evocative of the 19th-century seaside setting, and emotionally cool enough to let the music & drama resonate in it.
I don't have a lot of unobvious things to say about Peter Grimes itself, but it's easily the most dramatically effective opera I know (pitched with realistic emotion; legitimately psychologically ambiguous; paced impeccably) and musically it hits that 20th-century sweet spot where lyrical expressivity and disjointed abstraction meet. I've never been a huge opera fan, and experiencing one that feels emotionally authentic is a rare thing for me. Grimes's final mad scene and the following choral epilogue (which, tidelike, pulls the first Sea Interlude & chorus music back in) are devastating.
I love the orchestral passacaglia towards the end, where the undergirding theme (from the townspeople's gossip: "Grimes is at his exercise") goes metrically out of sync with the increasingly impassioned music layered above it in longer, more urgent phrases. It's like a shard of something with flames licking off of it, blown into a larger fire: social judgment kindled into tragedy, the whole theme of the opera transformed into wordless music. (I love how this subverts the baroque form, too: the bass line, though unchanging, is no stable element here.) The Sea Interludes, which are frequently performed as a stand-alone set by orchestras, were as gripping as ever, even if opera-goers tend not to be shy about coughing when no one is singing.
In the Lincoln Center subway stop after the show, someone (maybe a Juilliard kid?) was playing flute licks from the first Sea Interlude. I was feeling haunted enough to get on the uptown 1 train by mistake without noticing for a couple of stops.
There's a nice long chapter on Britten and Peter Grimes in Alex Ross's book, which you should read if you're at all interested in classical music.
1 Comments:
I did, as your well-received text message asked. I even had a brief favorable review on thoughtlights. It won most nautical.
For me, the highlights were the orchestral passages and the choras passage where they all cry out "PETER GRIMES!" and then almost silence, except for the orchestra playing a pianissimo triad a semitone away from the chorus. Man is that chilling.
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