Britten: Peter Grimes
I love Peter Grimes, love it - in the way Kevin Keegan would have loved it if Newcastle had beaten Manchester United (probably more so).
The first recording I owned was the Britten/Pears one and I loved it - still do. A couple of years later my wife bought me the John Vickers/Colin Davis recording on vinyl but, vinyl not being so portable, I ended up not listening to it as much. I finally got round to getting the CD a while ago and have spent the past few days listening to pretty much nothing else other than this (although I did watch the ENO Philip Langridge DVD
yesterday).It's wonderful to have more than one outstanding recording of any opera to listen to and it's especially great when the versions bring out very different sides of the drama as is the case here. Vickers' singing is much more muscular and brutal than Pears' and Davis conducts the score with an equal amount of conviction. The standout scene for me is Grimes' first entry after the Passacaglia ('Go there...') which hits you with the force of a gale and leaves you reeling.
Grimes features as a (relatively small) reference in the novel I'm currently writing, which is one of the reasons I've been listening to it so much - more on that later though.
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