BRITTEN Peter Grimes

Live recording of Aldeburgh’s 2013 anniversary Grimes

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Benjamin Britten

Genre:

Opera

Label: Signum

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 137

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: SIGCD348

SIGCD348. BRITTEN Peter Grimes. Steuart Bedford

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Peter Grimes Benjamin Britten, Composer
Alan Oke, Peter Grimes, Tenor
Alexandra Hutton, Niece I, Soprano
Benjamin Britten, Composer
Britten-Pears Ensemble
Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Mrs Sedley, Mezzo soprano
Charles Rice, Ned Keene, Baritone
Charmian Bedford, undefined, Soprano
Chorus of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama
Christopher Gillett, Rev Horace Adams, Tenor
David Kempster, Balstrode, Baritone
Gaynor Keeble, Auntie, Mezzo soprano
Giselle Allen, Ellen Orford, Soprano
Henry Waddington, undefined, Baritone
Opera North Chorus
Robert Murray, Bob Boles, Tenor
Stephen Richardson, Hobson, Bass-baritone
Steuart Bedford, Conductor
All who were present at the performances of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach this summer agree it was an unforgettable event. A week earlier the same cast had opened the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival with a pair of concert performances of the opera in the Maltings at Snape and it is a live recording drawn from those two evenings that Signum Classics has released here.

Heard live, the Maltings’ booming acoustic robbed the playing of the Britten-Pears Orchestra of a lot of crucial detail. But the microphones had been judiciously placed: on these discs the detail has miraculously resurfaced (listen to the gulls’ cries in the woodwind during the ‘Sunday Morning’ interlude) and the spacious recording quality is one of the major plus points of the set. This is an expertly paced performance, as one might expect with Steuart Bedford as conductor, building the tension incrementally over the span of the opera, sometimes at speeds faster than Britten’s own – but it does not present as strong a personality as the best of its rivals.

In part, this is because Alan Oke plays Peter Grimes as a very introverted character and declines to engage the drama as forcefully as most tenors do. He is heard to best effect when Grimes is peering deep into his soul (Oke’s final, subdued cries of ‘What harbour shelters peace?’ are painfully moving). Giselle Allen’s urgent Ellen Orford is well in the picture, though she does not always sound ingratiating, and David Kempster is a stalwart Balstrode. Among the rest of a good cast, Catherine Wyn-Rogers’s unexaggerated Mrs Sedley, Charles Rice’s suave Ned Keene and Henry Waddington’s resonant Swallow are the most vivid. The voices are quite closely miked and every word comes across clearly.

This Aldeburgh Music production is preferable to its nearest rival on LSO Live, thanks to superior recording quality and a more compelling sense of urgency. The current catalogue has some strong contenders, though, led by Colin Davis’s earlier studio recording on Philips/Decca, while the composer’s own recording surveys the field from a position of pre-eminence, still sounding as vivid as the day it was made.

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