Opera
Owen Wingrave
RCS, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
GIVEN the limited range in the current diet of new work being created for television, it seems little short of incredible that Benjamin Britten's pacifist opera Owen Wingrave was commissioned by the BBC as a direct consequence of the hit that Peter Grimes had been in its televised version, reaching the screen 45 years ago. The brilliance of this staging of it by director Oliver Platt and designer Cordelia Chisholm, with lighting by Alex Kilgour, is that it responds directly to those origins, scenes changing perspective and "dissolving" using gauzes, while the set and costuming are only a few subtle tones away from the monochrome of the Cold War years original. That sense of a particular scale is enhanced by conductor Timothy Dean's use of David Matthews' chamber reduction of the score for a band of 16 players, full of demanding detail for percussionist, harp, horn and winds.
Of course Britten's treatment of Henry James' story of the son of a military family who rejects that career is far from black and white. Christopher Nairne's Owen is too likeable a creation to be another of Britten's outsiders, and if the work presents problems for us in 2016, it is less that his denunciation of war seems more reasonable to most now than the appearance of misogyny in the succession of female voices lining up to denounce him, his teacher's wife Mrs Coyle (Annabella Ellis) the most sympathetic to his ostracism. Vocally, however, she, Lynn Bellamy, Maria Hughes and Charlie Drummond combine beautifully, and the lack of range in their ages seems less of a problem than among the male characters, although the standard of singing is very high across the cast.
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