Stuart Skelton’s Peter Grimes is psychologically splintered from the outset, so much so that the entire opera may be a psychotic episode rather than a tale from a life. The Australian tenor’s portrayal of Britten’s doomed fisherman probed dark new depths in this concert performance at the Bergen International Festival where, without a conceptualising director to cramp his style, he was able to put his stamp on the role as never before. For ENO and at the BBC Proms, Skelton’s Grimes was prodigious; here, with Bergen National Opera, he dared to take it further still. From the outset it was apparent that bad things were destined to occur while the balance of his mind was disturbed.
The indefatigable Ed Gardner has slotted in rehearsals for Peter Grimes concurrently with conducting Eugene Onegin in Paris. Indeed, he was due back there for more Tchaikovsky just 24 hours after this performance. Yet there was nothing tired about the electricity with which he fired up the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Such was the panache, you’d think his players had Britten’s score in their bones, and the sight of these musicians at work on a platform rather than in an orchestra pit added its own act of theatre. From the elegiac solo viola to the weirdly funky Weimar quintet that opens the third act, this was a reading of immediacy and power.
Both Skelton and the first-rate supporting company were compromised by the acoustic in the Grieghallen, an apple-turnover of a concert hall where the audience is banked up high and looks down on the performers. The soloists for this event were placed well forward of the acoustic baffles, beneath the highest point of the hall, so the swimming-bath sound was especially pronounced (although it will have been tamed by microphone placings for the video streaming). It took a while for the ear to adapt to the hollowness. Thankfully, so compelling were Gardner’s soloists that eventually the worry faded, although it was through no fault of theirs that Montagu Slater’s libretto never carried across as it should.
Giselle Allen, unrivalled as Ellen Orford since Grimes on the Beach, was joined by Roderick Williams, soon to be seen at the Aldeburgh Festival as that other Britten seafarer, Billy Budd, as a youthful but persuasive Captain Balstrode. So impeccably did both artists complement Skelton that it’s hard to believe neither will travel with the company when this Grimes visits the Edinburgh International Festival in August. Allen’s portrayal of a woman emotionally drawn to the rough fisherman but torn by the desire to protect his (here extraordinarily young) apprentice had a psychological complexity of its own; Williams, by contrast, imbued Balstrode with a telling belief in the virtues of bluff directness. He’s a friend to the fisherman, yet one unafraid to call him a fool. “Are you my conscience?” Grimes asks him, angrily; and yes, he is. As is Ellen.