Allan Clayton brings pathos and terror, along with energy where it’s often missing, to a revival of Britten’s “Peter Grimes.”
Benjamin Britten’s first, masterly opera “Peter Grimes” thrives on ambiguity — about the nature of abusive behavior, the sources of compassion, the chicken-and-egg relationship between a tortured psyche and a small town’s small-mindedness.
But one thing, at least, was clear when this work returned to the Metropolitan Opera on Sunday afternoon: The company has a star on its hands in the tenor Allan Clayton.
An established singer abroad, Clayton made his Met debut just this year, tireless and tormented in the title role of Brett Dean’s “Hamlet.” Back several months later, he is by far the high point of the company’s “Grimes” revival. Nimble, with a repertory that includes Handel alongside Kurt Weill’s “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” he is bound for a rich future at the house if it will have him.
Clayton’s Grimes stands apart not only in his appearance — unkempt, with windswept hair and a wiry beard, where his fellow inhabitants of the Borough look uniformly tidy, as though following a dress code — but also in his actions. He whips his head around with widened, piercing eyes, never at peace and paranoid about how others perceive him. Audibly and visibly doomed, his tone conveys bitterness and pain within the same melodic line as his face betrays fits of rage and shock at his own behavior. By the climactic third act, his voice exemplifies the essence of opera as a theatrical extremity of expression: His mad scene, a patchwork monologue of chest-pounding and stylized ugliness, is a thing of terror and wonder.
His performance, reminiscent of Jon Vickers’s fearless benchmark recording from the 1970s, is nearly enough to breathe sustainable life into a production that often lacks it. John Doyle’s staging, from 2008 — which unfolds on a unit set of towering, shabby wooden walls and windows — is showing its age as it creakily moves forward and backward throughout the opera’s two and a half hours.
Doyle’s signature approach — what has been called minimalist, though he prefers “essentialist” — was born in modest black box spaces, and eventually scaled to Tony Award-winning takes on Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway. His “Grimes” is a relic of that time but not as successful in 2022. His stripped-down aesthetic can reveal the heart of a work, but it relies on the detailed, well-rehearsed performances you won’t get with the short turnaround of a Met revival. So cast members tend to sing with little nuance at the audience, rather than to one another, and mostly while standing in place as they would in concert.
Still, Clayton wasn’t alone in transcending the production. Nicholas Carter, who also made his Met debut conducting “Hamlet,” here led “Grimes” with drive, precision and a painterliness that lends the work the cohesive shape of a tone poem. His interludes evoked dark, oceanic immensity; violent swerves and surges; and the emerging promise of a dawning sun. They were a source of theater where the staging came up short.
Dynamic, too, was Nicole Car as the widowed schoolmistress with hopeless belief in Grimes’s salvation. Car’s soprano, with lyrical grace at the top of her range and grave urgency at the bottom, was on Sunday a wellspring of calm and pathos. In the Prologue, her tone blended with Clayton’s gruff beauty for a duet of unsettling harmony.
And, despite moving as a unit, then remaining static for long stretches, the Met’s chorus was compelling as the chattering, destructive residents of the Borough. Its members gave horrifying voice to mob mentality, complementing Clayton’s unraveling in Act III with a chilling climax of their own. Occasionally emerging from the crowd were other standouts: Justin Austin’s lively Ned Keene; Patrick Carfizzi’s authoritative Swallow; Michaela Martens’s wickedly comical Mrs. Sedley.
Less persuasive were the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves as Auntie, in a performance more straightforwardly musical than characterful; and the bass-baritone Adam Plachetka as Balstrode, a major, complicated role that didn’t make much of an impression on Sunday. His voice beautiful but consistently bland, Plachetka gave his fateful directions to Grimes at the end of Act III — to take his boat out to sea and sink it — with a woodenness that threatened to flatten the moment.
That is, if it weren’t for Clayton’s response. Silent, he simply accepted his sentence with one last look back over his shoulder: an aching final aria performed with only his eyes.
Peter Grimes
Through Nov. 12 at the Metropolitan Opera, Manhattan; metopera.org.
Source: Music - nytimes.com
