Jeff's Music Corner. Peter Grimes: Now the Great Bear and Pleiades from the opera by Benjamin Britten.

Should you think opera a distant conceit of the 17th, 18th, and 19th Centuries, I give you this, Benjamin Britten's dark masterpiece of 1945, PETER GRIMES. Peter is a fisherman whose apprentices have the unfortunate and careless habit of dying while in Peter's care, and this small, small-minded, gossipy town comes to life in Britten's moving and fascinating score with stunning words by librettist Montagu Slater. This particular aria, "Now the Great Bear," is a study in terror, Peter singing for his life on nearly merely one note throughout, an E, while descending harmonics in the orchestra underscore his existential plunge into questions of Fate and Determinism. Tenor Jon Vickers was the quintessential Peter (even though it is rumored Benjamin Britten rather disliked his interpretation!) and his performance almost singlehandedly brought this opera into the standard repertoire. It is difficult to pull off this very modern anti-hero with any kind of honesty while making an audience care for him. I think Vickers straddles this delicate balance brilliantly. And he is a consummate musician. Listen as he creates a veritable auditorium in his mouth, placing the voice up front and directly dead on in the mask while lifting his soft palette into a cavern of resonant sound, most especially at around 1:32. I'm including the lyric below because it is one of the densest poems I have ever encountered in opera. How smart to have the melodic line subordinate to these heartbreaking words.

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

By the way, PBS just recorded the new production by the English National Opera, and it is a smashing version. Stiuart Skelton has one of those once in a lifetime voices of richness, power, and clarity and I love his performance, a man who doesn't need an orchestra to have a thousand overtones ringing through the room.