by With music that exceeds in every bar, parking spaces in every bar and a story with riptid inevitable inevitable, the downfall, Peter Grimes (1945) is ruled by the sea. No revelation there: On many occasions, his composer Benjamin Britten said so much himself. He and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, who created the role of Grimes, spent most of her adult life near Suffolk Coast, the North Sea, a stale backdrop. In a new staging for the Gothenburg Opera, which was led by Christoph Gedschold, the British director of director Netia Jones has accepted the usual idea of the seaemathorine, a practical cover for the existential questions of life, and maritime reality.
To underline the point, costumes, faded and weathered, were sprayed with salt. The workers who exercise fish in white aprons from the blood drop out of the blood are sprayed with blood. Every detail reminds us of a sea that is not figurative, but hard and physical. Jones is a newly appointed deputy director of the Royal Opera in London and is a radical creator who uses video for the original effect. This was her Gothenburg debut. She removed the opera from her original Ostanglian fishing village, which was taken from by by The district (1810), a collection of poems by George Crabbe, to a libretto from Montagu Slater.
The area scheme is now a remote island community off the west coast of the Swedes in a fictional gift. Gothenburg’s seafaring history – this is a port city with a Viking past is also recognized. The traditionally shaped opera house with 1,276 seats, which was opened in 1994, is airy and ship -like with decks, railings and sidewalks. The generous public financing comprises 72% of its annual budget (compared to 14% in 2022/23 in the Royal Ballet and Opera Great Britain).
The audience slowly rose as one, as if it were stunned by the way in which human cruelty could go hand in hand with music from such a restless beauty
We should also say that the pioneering work of the Gothenburger Opera has led to sustainability – green electricity, food waste into biogas, recycled costumes – for other opera companies (even though I am not sure whether someone is followed by their example for the storage of 50,000 bees and the sale of the honey).
Outside in the harbor, the skyline shape, pillars and cranes. Jones and her team have built up on all of this Grimes. What you see on stage repeats what you pass on on the way to the event location. The ingenious use of video projections, all of which were filmed in the Gothenburg archipelago and in the north, keeps turbulent sea and the cloudy sky in the foreground. The action takes place on a pontoon, water that is packed underneath.
The rest of the sentence is minimal. The appropriate roof of Grimes’ hut reflects that of the wooden church, in which the parishioners of hymn-singing parishioners reflect the mister-one of Britten’s characteristic musical cross-fads-losen before harassing the only outsider in its middle. The color is entertained, monochrome until explosively for the fires and celebrations in midsummer red red, which make ordinary, hard -working people a vengeful mob (lighting design of Ellen Rue). The sight of a portrait of Grimes, which hangs on a boom hook, which normally contains a few tons of raw fish is electrifying.
Every character in this large line -up, mostly Swedish, which sings in good, clear English, is well delineated – everything worth mentioning, but with Åke Zetterström is an unusually sympathetic balstrode that leads the ensemble. In the title role, the tenor Joachim Bäckström, who is radiant and detailed, conveys the frustration of the grown, poetic fisherman, whose negligence remains uncertain and complex towards his boy apprentices. The massaged singing connection of “Peter Grimes!” Due to the excellent choir of the Gothenburg operas, the intensity, the ugliness, the displaced grief of a scream of war. In the end, when his tormentors sing the name again, Pianissimo, Tuba played his soft, foggy horn call, they sounded like Salzlaiths.
The treatment of female roles revealed history for history: the widowed school mistress Ellen Orford, which was bravely delivered by the brilliant young soprano Matilda Sterby; Aunt (a benevolent, warm -hearted Katarina Karnéus); and their two -way, spirited nieces (Sofie Asplund and Mia Karlsson). Ellen is worrying and instrumental in the tragedy. They blind their own dreams for the truth of the situation. Aunt and the nieces are too often specified as nearlersen: not here. Her quartet, in which you meditate about the difficulties of being women in a world dominated by men, is one of the most rhapsodic passages in the opera together with the orchestral sea interluds, which act as chapter headings when work develops.
Most of the opera goals in Sweden hardly known, Peter Grimes is still not new in the country. The first performance outside of Great Britain in March 1946 was in Stockholm, with newer stagings in Gothenburg and elsewhere. This production, which was opened last weekend, always has a different degree of emotional effect. The fact that the line -up, the choir and the excellent orchestra were eliminated was the same part of the equation. The work ends when a new day begins and the networks are brought in with a steamed blow. In the end, the entire audience rose slowly than one, less from normal curtain houses and excitement, although there was too. It was more like we were stunned by the way human cruelty, which were baked, could go hand in hand with music from such restless, elliptical and violent beauty.
