ArtHaus Musik has re-released a fantastic 2001 Channel Four Television film of Benjamin Britten’s Owen Wingrave, with Canadian baritone Gerald Finley in the title role and Kent Nagano conducting the German Symphony Orchestra of Berlin.
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It’s an excellent opportunity to see the very best singers in an imaginative production perform a work that is usually done by opera schools.
I don’t understand why Owen Wingrave isn’t performed more often on main stages. It’s the same length as Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, so it’s not too short. Most importantly, I think, the opera contains in distilled form everything that Britten was most passionate about: the stupidity of war, the bravery of taking a stand against society, and the mysteriously malign power of certain men over boys.
It’s a dark, two-act work, modelled by librettist Mifanwy Piper from a short story by Henry James. Britten wrote it for the BBC, which first aired it in May, 1971. The opera had its stage début at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden exactly 40 years ago.
The original cast recording, made in Aldeburgh in November 1970, assembled Britain’s best singers of the time: Janet Baker, Benjamin Luxon, John Shirley-Quirk and, of course, Britten’s partner, Peter Pears.
The cast in the Channel Four film is no less wonderful. Finley brings the ideal balance of innocence and steely determination to his role. The other characters are not fully fleshed out, but each of the singers puts their own distinctive spin on their inability to accept Owen’s independence.
Josephine Barstow is excellent as Miss Wingrave and tenor Peter Savidge is earnestness incarnate as Spencer Coyle. Charlotte Hellekant is creepily distant as Kate, Owen’s fiancée.
The ghosts of Wingraves past are key players in this story, and they loom truculently wherever Owen turns inside the stark and forbidding country house the film’s producers found in the rain-soaked English countryside.
Director Margarete Williams does a masterful job of using the camera to induce claustrophobia.
Nagano keeps the orchestra sound lean and tight, knowing exactly when to give the music a little lift, to poke us viewers in the gut.
There is a hip-shaking little percussion figure straight out of a Leonard Bernstein score that pops up in the score over and over again. But instead of trying to make us smile, Britten uses the figure to remind us of the iron grip the Wingraves’ fighting history continues to exert over Owen, who stakes his life on wrestling the family ghosts to the ground.
It is but one of many clever means the composer uses to turn the emotional screws in the well-wrought tale.
You can find out more about this release here. (The ArtHaus website says there is a documentary on Britten and Pears included on the DVD, but I couldn’t find it on my review disc.)
This is a clip from the film:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
