London.(International)(Peter Grimes)(Opera Review)

Covent Garden was not the birthplace of Peter Grimes: the company that would become English National Opera gave the work's premiere at London's Sadler's Wells in 1945. But it entered the Royal Opera House repertory two years later and has rarely been absent since. In fact, it has acquired a status as England's national opera, equivalent, say, to Smetana's Bartered Bride, though infinitely darker.

The Royal Opera's new staging (July 3) was brought in from La Monnaie in Brussels, former stomping ground of company music director and conductor of the production Antonio Pappano. It was the work of German director Willy Decker, though prepared in London by Francois de Carpentries. Whereas realism had been the standard approach of former Grimes stagings locally, Decker's version, in stark and usually single-colored sets designed by John Macfarlane, went for something closer to Expressionism. In the Prologue, during the inquest over the death of Grimes's first apprentice, Ben Heppner's fisherman held onto a small grey coffin, which the villagers later opened, only to recoil from the smell. In the opening scene of Act I, where the inhabitants of the Borough go about their daily tasks centered on the fishing trade, no sea, boats or fish were visible. Instead, the villagers sat in rows, dressed (all but the two Nieces) in black, singing the opening chorus from hymn-sheets, led by Brian Galliford's Reverend Horace Adams--something of a key figure in Decker's presentation. No one drank during the inn scene, and only plain tables and a few chairs furnished the muddy-red wailed space of Auntie's hostelry.

This took a bit of getting used to--though in several scenes Macfarlane's mottled, almost diseased skies did suggest some sort of natural context otherwise only evoked--if vividly so--by Pappano's and the orchestra's sensationally clear outlining of Britten's powerful sea interludes. When the production did begin to come together, from the opening of Act II, it placed the chorus in the foreground as a hostile, dangerously volatile unit, moving about the stage with precision and menacing intent. Implacably opposed to Grimes from the start, ...