Not Only Opera

Bloody marvellous (mostly): Billy Budd at the ROH

Billy Budd
Royal Opera
Royal Opera House
Balcony standing D30, £9
23 April 2019
ROH page

I have many positive associations with Billy Budd. As a teenager I was given the Richard Hickox recording with Simon Keenlyside, Philip Langridge and John Tomlinson; at university I listened to it over and over again (along with a Colin Davis Don Giovanni). For months I tussled with the berth-deck shanty scene in my (doomed) undergraduate dissertation. My first trip to Glyndebourne with my now-husband was to see Michael Grandage’s highly entertaining production. And who doesn’t love Melville?

Deborah Warner’s production is not perfect, but it is very, very fine. The things that mar it do so slightly, are few and far between and are purely technical. Stage machinery (design by Michael Levine) is essential to Warner’s concept, and a brilliant one it is too – but it is too audible in the long set of quiet chords where Vere must tell Billy his fate. Billy’s early exuberance as he bids farewell to the Rights o’ Man is expressed by him leaping up a rope and singing it dangling there – well characterized but not a sympathetic setting for the singer to deliver one of his biggest moments.

As I say, relatively minor, fleeting and technical. Warner succeeds and then some in the bigger picture, particularly in the way she allows room for the allegorical and the ambiguous. It feels like a clear response to and corollary of the original Melville and its interpretation through Forster and Britten – an approach very different from Grandage’s, where a more realistic setting provides the story’s grounding, perhaps much as a visual reference of Napoleonic-era ships might for someone reading the novella. Levine and Warner instead move the allegory emphatically into the physical space of the stage, furthering the process of abstraction Britten started by telling the story as an opera. The strategy allows not only for some striking imagery but also movements and pictures that enable powerful resonance with the music and the story, lingering long after in the mind.

It also prompts a very different response from the singer-actors, made particularly striking by the fact the cast is almost exactly the same as at Glyndebourne (a fact that at first worried me; I needn’t have). The change is clearest in Jacques Imbrailo as Billy. In the Grandage Imbrailo’s Billy was pretty down-the-line, a friendly, likeable, jolly so-and-so. In the Warner he now seems driven by a near-demonic energy – that’s why the men can’t help but love him, why Claggart can’t help but hate him, why he leaps up that rope, why his love for Vere is so fervent, why he is so ambitious, why his fist comes bursting madly out. He is like one eaten up inside, possessed. I’ve not seen an angsty Billy before and I like it.

The scope is smaller for Toby Spence as Vere and Brindley Sherratt as Claggart; here it is more a question of subtly emphatic expressions of the characters in the score: Vere’s impetuousness with Claggart and his delusion of his self; Claggart’s angry pride against his superiors, his bitter loneliness. All the other singers are on the same page as well – particularly excellent are Clive Bayley as Dansker, David Soar as Mr Flint, Sam Furness as the Novice and the chorus (though sometimes bizarrely soloistic and non-homogenous – alarmed by the many different lines, perhaps?). Every single singer deserves the utmost praise for diction, which I’ve never heard better in the main auditorium.

A superb production, a wonderful cast – so why an incompetent conductor? I’ve heard Ivor Bolton in Le nozze di Figaro before and don’t remember it bothering me; either he’s got worse or the complexities of Britten’s score are beyond his ken. If I were feeling melodramatic I would call it a criminal shame – which I am: it’s a criminal shame, given all else that is so good. On opening night the work was obviously under-rehearsed, with major errors from all sections; the larger polyphonic passages were on the verge of falling apart; in that long series of quiet chords not a single one was together. This from an orchestra I know to be excellent. What a shambles; what a shame; what was the Royal Opera thinking?

Post scriptum
On closing night (10 May 2019; Balcony standing C67, £9) you’ll be glad to hear the orchestra had made up for lost time and played substantially more accurately – though, as I could confirm from my closer vantage point, with no help from the conductor.

There were unexpected improvements elsewhere. Sherratt, on the first night profound but with enough wobble to make his crucially important semitones foggy, seems to have taken on some advice: he now added slight but palpable accents to the starts of those notes, not disrupting the line but giving exactly the needed definition and an added dose of menace. This and other minor tweaks grew Sherratt’s performance into a definitive and exhilarating rendition, a match for Imbrailo’s continued brilliance.

An expected strength of Warner’s open approach is that it richly rewards re-viewing, and such was the case. In fact the only downside is that I have forgotten how bleak an opera it actually is; my companions, seeing it for the first time, observed my giddy joy with distaste evolving into sincere concern.