The Gramophone Choice - Owen Wingrave
James McCarthy
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
These are some of the finest versions of Britten's Owen Wingrave currently available and that we suggest are worth addition to your music collection.
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.
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.
