Let me begin – most unusually – with the orchestra. The ENO's production of Peter Grimes (they're still, thankfully, at the Coliseum – despite the best efforts of the Arts Council) is remarkable in many ways, but the orchestra under Martyn Brabbins is quite outstanding. Their ability to draw the rapturous and rhapsodic from Benjamin Britten's score was met with deservedly tumultuous applause. Rapturous? Rhapsodic? This is Peter Grimes we're talking about here, an opera famed for its grimness and desolation. The music itself, though, rolls in great glorious waves, the personification of the unseen character at the centre of the plot – the sea itself. Peter Grimes is a fisherman whose apprentice has died at sea. The village seeks to condemn Peter Grimes for some unknown crime against the boy but it is decided the death was an accident. Nevertheless, Grimes is still the outsider, untrusted and in some way different. Many have seen reflections in this of Britten
Sparkling musical invention pierces the gloom of George Benjamin’s mysterious new chamber opera; Britten’s masterpiece holds its own at ENO; and one woman, 7,866 pipes and resounding fun
One of the best lines in James Graham s play about Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? remarks on how the British love a pub quiz because it combines their favourite things: drinking and being right .
In David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, the mob assembles before the music has even started – silhouetted at the back, muttering and menacing. Ah, Britten’s mob: simultaneously the source of some of the most electrifying, elemental choral writing since Mussorgsky and a licence for British directors to indulge in premium-strength snobbery. Fully endorsed by