This is an exciting achievement. Based on concert performances given in Manchester last year, it restores to circulation the original, four-act version of the score (coincidentally set exactly 200 years earlier in the troubled summer of 1797). The main and crucial difference between this and Britten’s two-act revision is a scene at the close of what is here Act 1, in which ‘Starry’ Vere addresses his crew and is hailed by them as the sailors’ and particularly Billy’s champion, thus establishing the relationship between captain and foretopman (something, by the way, that doesn’t exist in Melville’s novel). It is thus an important scene though musically not particularly distinguished. One can quite see why Britten wanted a tauter two-act drama. There are also minor restorations in the scenes between Vere and Claggart before and after the aborted attempt to engage the French in battle.
In Manchester’s new Bridgewater Hall, where the recording was made (though, to judge by the absence of background noise, there must have been sessions without an audience), the orchestral contribution was apparently heard with exceptional clarity. That has been carried over into what is an amazingly wide spectrum of sound on the recording: indeed sometimes the orchestra is simply too loud.
Nagano’s Halle is now very much his own orchestra, fashioned to suit his ideas, and he gives us a wonderfully full-bodied, accurate and detailed account of the many-faceted score, one of the composer’s most inspired on every count. There are electrifying moments, not least the battle scene, where the listener feels very much in the middle of things, and the end of Act 3 where those tremendous and ominous series of chords represent Vere telling Budd of the sentence of death. Britten, in his 1967 Decca studio recording, prefers a leaner sound and a slightly tauter approach all-round – in his hands you feel the tension of the personal relationships even more sharply than with Nagano.
There, of course, Britten is conducting his preferred, revised edition. In 1993, however, there came to light an off-the-air recording of the premiere production, issued by VAI, using the 1951 original and, fascinatingly, made on a tape recorder by the wife of Theodor Uppman, the original Billy. It is a riveting document in very tolerable sound, though a few bars are missing where tapes were changed. The young Britten in the theatre gives even greater tension to his interpretation though inevitably the orchestral sound leaves much to be desired. This recording is more revelatory in letting us make comparisons with the first cast and that of the new set.
I don’t think it’s nostalgia (I heard the Covent Garden staging of 1951), rather a close comparison on this occasion, that makes me favour Uppman’s Budd over Hampson’s, or Glossop’s on Decca, or even Thomas Allen’s on the arresting PolyGram video of Tim Albery’s ENO staging. Uppman catches better than any the sheer, simple, unsophisticated, natural goodness of the man, a smile in his tone, a lightness in his heart. Hampson, like Uppman an American baritone, is, by any other standard, very good, singing with all his customary beauty of voice and intelligence of style, but he isn’t so evidently ‘in’ the role as are Uppman and Allen, imparting a touch of self-consciousness that goes against the grain of the writing. For instance, Hampson makes too much of Billy of the Darbies, singing it as a set piece; Uppman sings it to himself as a folk-song in a reflective, plangent tone, which is exactly as it should be, and here the live recording is particularly immediate.
Halfvarson, as Budd’s antagonist, the evil Claggart – how unerringly Britten depicts his malevolent nature! – gives us a mighty presence, singing with tremendous power and bite, but by the same token he gives us almost too much, and not always steady, tone. His slightly generalized projection of nastiness might do as well for Hagen as for the master-at-arms. Michael Langdon in 1967, even more Frederic Dalberg (quite horribly sinister on stage) in 1951, are much more specific, varying tone more subtly, voicing the text more pointedly. I would have preferred to have John Tomlinson, the best Claggart I have ever heard or seen, on this recording.
Where Vere is concerned, Rolfe Johnson sings his heart out as he presents Vere’s tormented soul, but vocally he hasn’t the cutting edge and heroic touch of Pears in 1967, even more in 1951 where he was nearer the right age for the part than either his later self or Rolfe Johnson, whose tone these days sounds uncomfortably strained under pressure. Pears’s cries of “It’s not his trial, it’s mine, mine. It is I whom the devil awaits”, a quite crucial passage after Budd has struck Claggart dead, is simply soul-searing in 1951. For the rest, Gidon Saks makes a dominant Mr Flint, the sailing-master, but he, like Halfvarson, tends to let voice take over from interpretation in the modern manner. Richard Van Allan (a really implacable Claggart on the video) is here, predictably, a characterful Dansker, and Andrew Burden stands out as a properly scared Novice, far preferable to Tear’s placid reading on Decca.
In spite of my reservations about individual interpretations, the sum here is greater than the parts, and I heartily recommend this new version which, in almost every respect, is equal to the demands of a technically difficult piece, not least as regards the choirs taking part. The harrowing drama is brought into the home with almost unbearable immediacy. It is also the first recording to contain the opera on two discs. Of course, if you want the two-act version, the Decca is still there as a satisfying record, in every sense, of the composer’s revised thoughts (by a small margin, I think the changes were for the better), and the VAI issue is an invaluable piece of documentation with some superb portrayals to commend it. And the video version, superbly conducted by David Atherton with Langridge as the most tortured Vere of all, is a riveting experience.'