Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✭✩✩
by Benjamin Britten, directed by Tim Albery
Canadian Opera Company, Hummingbird Centre, Toronto
September 25-October 10, 2003
The COC's fall season begins with two operas concerning individuals at odds with the society around them. In Puccini's Tosca (1900) the moral issues are black and white. In Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes (1945) the issues are all in shades of grey. In a small fishing village fisherman Peter Grimes despises the money-grubbing society around him, but when one of his apprentices dies at sea with him, the village shuns him as a murderer even though a court acquits him. The villagers clearly use Grimes as a scapegoat for their own moral lapses. To complicate matters Grimes, who sees visions and cannot control his fits of rage, strikes the woman he loves and could easily have beaten his apprentice to death.
The physical production of Peter Grimes, borrowed from the English National Opera, is oppressively unattractive. Its disparate elements--shoulder-high houses, a large boat, giant splinters as trees--present no unified vision. Tim Albery's direction is primarily realistic except when he has the chorus exaggeratedly react en masse and freeze into position, a heavy-handed way to show the town united against Grimes.
American tenor Robert Brubaker sings Grimes with searing intensity and is frightening effective in depicting the loner as psychotic. However, showing Grimes as so mentally disturbed from the very start alters the characters' relationships. It makes the efforts of his only friends, Ellen and Captain Balstrode, in procuring him another apprentice look, at best, seriously misguided, despite the sensitive portrayals of Frédérique Vézina and Alan Opie in those roles.
The chorus of villagers is itself the main antagonist of the work and the COC chorus is stunningly powerful and precise. Individual villagers give colour to the community, most notably Anna Steiger as the blowsy innkeeper, Matthew Lord as a drunken Methodist and Susan Gorton as the local Miss Marple on drugs. Conductor Richard Bradshaw keeps the tension level high throughout.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-10-02.
Photo: Robert Brubaker and Max Kinsella. ©2003 COC.
2003-10-02
Peter Grimes