Britten's Owen Wingrave
Britten's Owen Wingrave
The Gramophone Choice
Peter Colman-Wright bar Owen Wingrave Alan Opie bar Spencer Coyle James Gilchrist ten Lechmere Elizabeth Connell sop Miss Wingrave Janice Watson sop Mrs Coyle Sarah Fox sop Mrs Julian Pamela Helen Stephen mez Kate Robin Leggate ten Sir Philip Wingrave, Narrator Tiffin Boys’ Choir; City of London Sinfonia / Richard Hickox
Chandos CHAN10473 (107’ · DDD · S/T/N) Buy from Amazon
After experimenting with smaller-scale forms of musical theatre throughout the 1960s, Britten returned to ‘grand’ opera in Owen Wingrave, based on Henry James’s pacifist debate about following the flag or one’s conscience. Premiered as a TV commission, Wingrave enjoyed unmerited Cinderella status among Britten’s stage works until the 2001 TV film conducted by Kent Nagano (with Gerald Finley in the title-role – see below) and an innovative stage production by Tim Hopkins at Covent Garden’s Linbury Studio in 2007.
Over the years Richard Hickox used his studio skills to telling effect in the vocal works of Britten. In this recording following concert performances, Peter Coleman-Wright is most adept at conveying Owen’s pain and troubled conscience, the while never giving way to an over-emotionalism untrue to anyone brought up in a soldier’s family. Alan Opie, in what is in many ways the beau role of the military tutor Spencer Coyle, achieves both a superb neutrality and an evident empathy with Owen’s decision to quit the military life. Robin Leggate avoids caricature (or simple Peter Pears homage) in the small but essential role of the family termagant, General Sir Philip Wingrave. The women are no less characterful, with an especially sympathetic reading of Coyle’s wife from Janice Watson.
Throughout Wingrave, Britten’s cunning reworking of rhythmic structures and harmonic devices pioneered as early as Peter Grimes reaches a new level of plasticity and sophistication. The shimmer of orchestral sound – sometimes impressionistic, sometimes Gamelan-influenced, sometimes wholly percussive – is a still insufficiently appreciated wonder of 1970s operatic writing. The core duets of Coyle/Wingrave, Wingrave/Lechmere and Wingrave/Kate (in which she sets the reluctant soldier the challenge of spending a night alone in the haunted room) are anchored on a sophisticated version of the tonal atonal structures on which Britten had once based The Turn of the Screw. It lends the drama an amazing tensile strength, closely parallel to the Berg operas which Britten wanted to get to know better in the 1930s but was discouraged by his teachers from approaching too closely.
This set, in Chandos’s customary natural, comfortable sound, became the first recording in any medium to do the work full musical and dramatic justice. It should satisfy the curiosity of those who wonder why its devotees hail Wingrave as Britten’s greatest completed opera.
DVD Recommendation
Gerald Finley bar Owen Wingrave Peter Savidge bar Spencer Coyle Hilton Marlton ten Lechmere Josephine Barstow sop Miss Wingrave Anne Dawson sop Mrs Coyle Elizabeth Gale sop Mrs Julian Charlotte Hellekant mez Kate Martyn Hill ten Sir Philip Wingrave Andrew Burden Narrator Deutsches Symphony Orchestra, Berlin / Kent Nagano
Video director Margaret Williams
ArtHaus Musik DVD 100 372 (150‘ · 16:9 · PCM stereo · 2 & 5). Includes ‘Benjamin Britten: The Hidden Heart’ – a film directed by Teresa Griffiths. Buy from Amazon
Britten’s penultimate opera was planned to be equally effective on television or in the opera house, but it was its first stage production at Covent Garden that made the bigger impact. Now this film version, imaginatively directed by Margaret Williams and tautly conducted by Kent Nagano, helps swing the balance the other way.
There’s almost nothing stagey about the opera here. The camera roams freely indoors and out, using cleverly executed angles to follow members of the fearsome Wingrave family at their ancestral home, and throwing in flashbacks and voice-overs wherever they might be apposite – much as one might expect of an adaptation of a literary classic. In fact, the period has been updated to the 1950s, which necessitates some minor changes to Myfanwy Piper’s libretto (no need to escort the ladies to their bedchambers by candlelight any more), but this handsome version in all other respects stays close to Britten’s intentions. Gerald Finley is a tower of strength as Owen Wingrave, completely believable as the sturdy but sensitive scion of an upper-crust family. The other singers are well cast, and play expertly to the camera.
The ‘special feature’ on the disc, Teresa Griffiths’s three-part biographical film, Benjamin Britten: The Hidden Heart, lasts as long as the opera. It focuses on three major works – Peter Grimes, the War Requiem and Death in Venice – and, while its message is somewhat diffuse and the editorial style jumps irritatingly from image to image as if afraid to let the camera come to rest, it does include a wealth of fleeting extracts showing Britten and Pears in performance. Those alone are enough to make it a desirable collector’s item.
