Word: britten
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...more than a new opera; for the Met it is a new kind of opera. Dissonance has been heard in the Met's hallowed halls before-in Strauss's Elektra and Salome. Bernard Rogers' The Warrior, which was flashed on & off last year, was nonsensically dissonant. Britten's music runs from perky jigs in the woodwinds to forceful, discordant barkings in the brass. The Met's soggy chorus would need a shot in the arm to handle some of the rounds, which sound like sea chanties and are as complex as a Bach fugue. Singers...
...foreign-born conductors, Britten's English idiom was new, at first forbidding and finally fascinating. Said white-haired, Russian-born Conductor Emil Cooper, who will conduct the first performance of Grimes: "For 40 years I am a conductor, but I do not know English opera before. There is no difficulty in doing Italian opera; when you start you know what you are doing. French and German the same. This is somehow different . . . the rhythms and inflections of English speech which Britten gets into his music. . . . But I am excited...
Once in rehearsal, when the orchestra stumbled on some of Britten's rocky rhythms, Conductor Cooper slapped his score with his baton, cried out: "No, no, it is not wrong. I am like you, gentlemen. At first I thought it was wrong . . . you will change your minds." Most already had. Muttered one violinist, tapping his temple: "It's good, it's very good...
...real challenge for the Met, with its stable of posturing actors who sometimes make opera more gross than grand, would be to project the power and punch Composer Britten has packed into his Peter Grimes. One top Met official admitted: "If it flops, it'll be our fault." The Met, like most conservative opera houses, still stages its operas like any smalltime Italian company, with every singer's steps and gestures stylized, so that a substitute can step into any role on a moment's notice. The stylizing makes for convenience, but hot for conviction...
...rehearsal for the London première of Peter Grimes, Composer Britten was all over the stage, his enthusiasm overcoming his shyness, begging his singers to act their parts instead of grimacing and posturing. There were few in the Met's cast who didn't realize what they were up against. Soprano Regina Resnik is a Britten veteran: she had sung in his Rape of Lucretia in Chicago last year (TIME, June 9). But Tenor Frederick Jagel, who sings the leading role, was worried: "This is so tough dramatically that it becomes tough musically...