INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL
“Borough,” found space aplenty to create a potent and absorbing visual spectacle.
That moment, for instance, where Ellen Orford questions Grimes’s apprentice boy outside the church, counterpointed by the pious service within, took full advantage of the Usher Hall layout, the entire chorus turning its back on Ellen (and us) to face the organist, Rector and imposing wall of organ pipes. To me, that summed up trenchantly the central theme of ostracisation.
The chorus is key, in this case a gloriously haranguing combination of Bergen’s Philharmonic Choir, Edvard Grieg Kor, Collegiûm Mûsicûm and students from Manchester’s RNCM, whose opinion, warped as it is, counts. Their visceral, antagonistic interaction with the cast and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, all under Edward Gardner’s direction, was a chilling reminder of tribal justice.
It is Grimes, suspected of serial child abuse, whose card is marked, guilty or not. Tenor Stuart Skelton wrung every ounce of torment from the role, his final exit through the audience agonising and heart-stopping. Gripping performances, too, from a solid and colourful cast, Christopher Purves’ resonating Balstrode, Erin Wall as the empathetic Ellen, the charismatic duo of Catherine Wyn-rogers’ Mrs Sedley and Susan Bickley’s Auntie, to name a few.
Underpinned by Gardner’s clear-minded vision and his orchestra’s illuminating response, this performance reaffirmed Britten’s unquestionable genius: his uncanny knack of creating the profoundest musical statements through ingenious, transparent craftsmanship. KEN WALTON Queen’s Hall JJJJJ Pious Christian faith; the inevitability of death. It was an unapologetically serious-minded recital from the exceptional German bass René Pape and pianist Camillo Radicke. There might not have been many chuckles, but it nevertheless showed a singer of exceptional intensity and focus, a figure who communicated with disarming directness and sincerity.
There was an almost microscopic focus to Pape’s singing, with every phoneme carefully dispatched – even the forbidding clusters of consonants in Dvořák’s Czech-language Biblical Songs – and, more gratifyingly, a sensuousness to his variations in tone, from an almost ethereal half-voice to a hall-filling bellow. It was there, too, in Radicke’s pianism, with chords exquisitely balanced and placed with care and precision, even if occasionally he might have taken a lighter touch with some of the accompaniments’ filigree decorations.
Pape found the passions surging quietly behind the religious devotion in Beethoven’s hymn-like Gellert Lieder, and in his hands, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death – miniature song dramas in which death stalks the sick, the lost, the war-injured – were touching tragedies rather than gruesome comedies, and all the more chilling as a result. Quilter’s Three Shakespeare Songs provided a snatch of light amid the otherwise dark material – but this was an exceptional recital, perceptive and entirely persuasive. DAVID KETTLE