How many professional companies in the UK could currently muster a staging of Peter Grimes? You could count them on one hand with fingers to spare. Enter British Youth Opera and director Will Kerley with a concert-production of serious power, a showcase of young talent and – more importantly – a step-ladder not just for the singers, but the conductors, directors, stage managers and music staff of the future.
In an embattled operatic world – assailed by shrinking opportunities, dwindling companies and disappearing funding – British Youth Opera is both a rare path into a career that has never offered fewer footholds, and a reminder of what’s at stake if it crumbles. Founded by Labour MP Denis Coe in 1987, BYO harks back to a time not just of greater artistic optimism, but political commitment and aspiration.
There are ensemble operas and then there’s Grimes. Benjamin Britten’s post-war study in small-town, small-minded prejudice, isolation and fear balances the musical mob – the massed, anonymous howl of The Borough, supplied here by the Cambridge Philharmonic Chorus – with detailed character-sketches, queasy in their dramatic precision. It’s these that give BYO’s members their opportunity, supplying everyone from drug-dealing apothecary and local lady-killer Ned Keene to curtain-twitching Mrs Sedley, world-weary landlady Auntie and world-denying vicar Horace Adams.
Three professionals (including two BYO alumni) fill in the gaps – musical pillars around which the action coalesces: Emma Bell, as schoolmistress Ellen Orford, up-and-comer Eugene Dillon-Hooper as the lawyer Swallow and the first chance to hear Mark Le Brocq as Grimes himself. Coming hot on the heels of the tenor’s award-winning Aschenbach for Welsh National Opera it’s an intriguing prospect, and one that delivers in shoals.
Kerley and designer Millie Richmond lean into the makeshift, subsistence world of Britten’s Borough (and of off-West-End opera), playing gently Brechtian games with a drama that starts and ends in concert dress, dissolving into sea-battered mid-century Suffolk between times. A giant video screen provides decorative visual support – moody seascapes; close-ups of fishing-nets and shingle and gulls – while failing to supply the essential surtitles. Without these, anyone unfamiliar with the libretto will have emerged little the wiser despite the cast’s best efforts.
The action is taut, carefully paced by Harry Sever and his impressive Cambridge Philharmonic. Words may be lost under their weight, but the drama isn’t. The tension crackles from the start, sparking between Rhian Davies’ deliciously prudish Mrs Sedley, equally appalled and compelled by Oliver Heuzenroeder’s Keene – dispatching his consonants like lewd suggestions, his glinting baritone cutting through the texture with ease. Davies relishes her “Murder most foul”, a nicely grotesque counterweight to the glassy fragility of the female quartet.
Caitlin Mackenzie’s Auntie tolerates no nonsense, ruling over The Boar and her “Nieces” (prettily sung by Jessica Hopkins and Anusha Merrin at this London performance) with easy authority, though sometimes struggling to soar above an over-enthusiastic orchestra – on stage, rather than muted by a pit. If Matthew Bawden’s vicar is all fluting ineffectuality, Justin Jacobs’ brings a welcome note of anarchy to Methodist preacher Bob Boles, sounding wild without ever being it: a model of gleaming-eyed orthodoxy. And there’s earthy resonance and just a hint of threat from Joshua McCullough’s Hobson, frenetically beating his drum to stir up the lynch-mob. The latter, sadly, are a damp squib: underpowered, entries scrappy, diction lacking. Chilling as a nice cup of Earl Grey. I’m sure there are practical reasons why BYO couldn’t supplement them with young talent, but it seems like a missed opportunity.
Bell’s wilfully naïve Ellen conceals as much as she reveals, voice bursting its bounds in “My voice out of the pain” and “Embroidery in childhood”, her manner now girlish, now imperious. Bluff and direct, singing with speech-like ease and clarity, Mark Stone’s Balstrode os the straight man both to Bell’s repressed torrents and to a monumental Grimes from Le Brocq.
His fisherman is no man-child; there are none of the self-soothing ticks and inner voices we have seen recently from Stuart Skelton or Allan Clayton, just a proud man and a stubborn one, whose alienation is self-made. Coupled with moments of disarming vocal beauty – a “Now the Great Bear” that shimmers with the mirage of hope, suspended impossibly at the top of the voice, a mad scene coloured as much with regret and missed opportunities as deranged grief – his muscular delivery makes for a compelling anti-hero.
And what of Kerley’s repeated visual motif: Grimes carrying a wooden cross (the frame of his “boat”), striding out into the auditorium with the weight of it on his shoulder? Can a Christ-like Grimes really bear The Borough’s sins? It’s a stretch, but there’s something here that a fuller staging might be able to crystallise.