Peter Grimes On Aldeburgh Beach

(Arthaus Musik)

4 Stars

In June last year, the Aldeburgh Festival staged Benjamin Britten's 1945 opera Peter Grimes on the Suffolk beach of the town where the piece is set and this DVD is a record of those astonishing three performances.

The libretto for the piece, composed by communist playwright and poet Montagu Slater, draws on early English dramatic verse rather than the pentameters of conventional opera, which gives it a more conversational tone throughout.

Though some have seen the opera as an anti-homophobic allegory and Britten himself described it as "the struggle of the individual against the masses ... The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual," in fact Slater's conception is more multi-layered than any simple black-and-white depiction of its anti-hero.

In many ways, it anticipates Brecht's characters like Mother Courage and Galileo, of whom the former declared that one could not merely condemn or praise them.

The other dominant character of the piece is, of course, the sea. Though the catastrophic storms of 1953 with their consequent loss of life were yet to happen, erosion of the coastline has always been a constant threat to East Anglia, which Slater anticipates by having his crowd of fishermen sing: "And if the spring tide eats the land again/Till even the cottages and cobbled walls of fishermen/Are billets for the thievish waves which take/As if in sleep, thieving for thieving's sake."

I had some technical problems with the DVD, which wouldn't play in my Blu-Ray player but was fine on an older device.

The subtitles didn't work either but that didn't much matter because the diction of all the performers is superb. There is none of the self-indulgent warbling common to so much operatic singing.

Karl Dallas