Billy Budd, Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk, UK — outstanding performances
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It had sailed to Australia and back. Yet, until last weekend, Billy Budd had never been to Snape Maltings, the music campus its composer founded. To some degree, that makes sense: Benjamin Britten’s maritime opera of 1951 needs a venue sturdy enough to carry its boisterousness, and a staging dramatic enough for its narrative about life aboard a British man o’ war during the French Revolution. So there was a risk that this concert performance — an Opera North production reimagined for the Aldeburgh Festival — might be too restrictive.
In fact, it was anything but, mainly because it bent over backwards to serve the music. Who needs nautical costumes when you have the Chorus of Opera North, singing with the unbuttoned enthusiasm of a hundred sailors? Who needs nautical effects when they’re all there in the score — the crashing of waves; the ocean currents — and are performed by an orchestra with astonishing muscularity? And who needs the straitjacket of an overt interpretation? This opera is a complex amalgam of Christian parable, an exposé of the destructive power of forbidden love, and much in between. It thrives on the power of suggestion. So conductor Garry Walker and the Orchestra of Opera North did well to preserve the music’s shades of grey.
As did the unanimously outstanding cast. Brindley Sherratt’s superbly sung John Claggart is more austere than villainous, embittered by the knowledge of what he can’t have. Alan Oke more than makes up in characterisation what he occasionally lacks in vocal finesse. His is a scholarly kind of Captain Vere, bowed down with the anguish of moral indecision. Elsewhere, it’s easy to appreciate the subtle effects of the ship’s claustrophobic environment: to pity Oliver Johnston’s petrified Novice; to admire the gruff bravery of Conal Coad’s Dansker.
As for the title role, it’s hard to imagine someone better suited to it than Roderick Williams. If he didn’t have such a beautiful voice, this baritone might have made a good salesman; he certainly has the winning charm. It pays dividends in his take on Billy Budd, a man who ultimately proves too loveable for his own good.
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