Gale Force.(Peter Grimes)(Opera review)

Few operas are as rooted in one place as Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," which has rumbled back to the Metropolitan Opera, in a new production by John Doyle. The title character, a dark-souled fisherman who goes mad after his apprentices die, was the invention of the poet George Crabbe, who grew up in Aldeburgh, on the eastern coast of England, in the later eighteenth century, and apparently based Grimes on a detested local character. Montagu Slater, the opera's librettist, wove his elaboration of the tale into various Aldeburgh settings. And Britten, a resident of the same town for most of his adult life, brilliantly evoked its sights and sounds in his music--the crying of gulls, the creaking of buoys, the endless booming of the waves. The obvious way to stage "Grimes" is to re-create Aldeburgh and let Britten's flawless score do the rest. This was the approach taken by Tyrone Guthrie, who first directed the opera at Covent Garden, in 1947, two years after the premiere, and who later brought a vividly detailed version to the Metropolitan Opera, in 1967. That classic production played at the Met as recently as 1998, and, while it showed its age, it remained a deeply absorbing experience: you were pulled into a kind of tragic picture postcard.

Doyle, celebrated for his recent presentations of "Sweeney Todd" and "Company" on Broadway, has banished the Moot Hall, the nets, the scurrying boys, the lanterns glimmering in fog, and other familiar bits of Grimesiana. Instead, he and his set designer, Scott Pask, confront audiences with a kind of gritty abstraction of coastal life. High wooden walls dominate the stage, their surfaces weathered and sooty. Doors and windows open to disclose various townspeople, their bodies silhouetted against gray-green or sky-blue backgrounds. There are fishermen's hats and other costumes redolent of the sea, but the garb lacks a strong sense of period; the supporting characters, so vibrantly differentiated in Slater's words and Britten's music, tend to blend in with the chorus. Even Grimes is sometimes hard to pick out from the mass of singers, who keep pressing forward in formation, like a black-clad, puritan army.

It's a handsome-looking show, though it's studiously, perhaps excessively, grim. Britten filled his score with hymns, dances, and delicious little throwaway tunes, which create a rich illusion of daily bustle; without a facade of ordinary life onstage, the explosions of violence lose their shock value. Still, "Grimes" profits from being seen without the usual quaint clutter. You come face to face with the opera's darkest elements: not just the much analyzed psychology of Grimes, who may or may not be guilty of abusing his apprentices, but also the psychology of the crowd, which lustily passes judgment on the fisherman without having heard the evidence. And those walled sets serve as a superb sounding board for the chorus, which gave the performance of the night.

Donald Palumbo recently took over as the Met's chorus master, and the wisdom of that choice was already apparent in the "Orfeo ed Euridice" last May. He has taken a gifted ensemble and imposed discipline and direction: fuzzy enthusiasm has given way to precise intensity. In "Grimes," he has done wonders again. At the climax of the work, the townspeople deliver an anthem of rage that includes the line "Him who despises us we'll destroy!" After reaching an initial fortissimo, the dynamics drop to a whisper, and the chorus repeats those words in an obsessive staccato, with the strings playing pizzicato in tandem. On opening night, it was sometimes hard to tell voices and strings apart, and that fusion of choral and orchestral sound symbolized the unanimity of hatred to which Grimes is subjected. Even scarier was the blending of bass voices and horns toward the end of the sequence--a noise like howling wind.

Anthony Dean Griffey, as Grimes, had the challenge of keeping his head above that sea of sound. A lyric tenor of unusual sensitivity, he lacks ...