Prom 60 - 27.08.13: Britten – Billy Budd

[Stanley Stewart]

This was clearly so, as the response has been so very positive. At home, I found it difficult to adjust to certain things - for instance, I couldn't really appreciate "Look, through the port comes the moonshine astray", a deeply moving moment normally, because all I could think about was whether Imbrailo's voice was going to survive to the end. It did, fortunately.

Was there a good-sized audience? A lot of people still seem to think Britten is 'difficult'.

Sebastian Petit's review concludes - para 3:

"But a nearly full Hall was held, hardly daring to breathe, for the full length of the exit..."

You could feel and rejoice in the moment over the airwaves. Deeply satisfying.

[Mary Chambers]

Thank you, Stanley. Yes, that long silence was very impressive.

[David Underdown]

In the hall, the odd catch in Imbrailo's throat didn't seem out of place for the situation he found himself in. Having seen the production at Glyndebourne the previous week, it was interesting to comapre and contrast. It was certainly some of the best usage of the screens around the back of the stage to show details drawn from the actual Glyndebourne set designs. On the whole I did like having the action at the front fo the stage, but beforehand I had wondered if they would use that only for the scenes in Vere's cabin (which at Glyndebourne is dropped into the main set), the normal raised stage could have been quite a good evocation of the quarterdeck (the Glyndebourne set does seem a little trapped below decks at times, even when they are clearly supposed to be on the quarterdeck). I was far closer in the hall (second row arena) than at Glyndebourne (foyer circle), which made the finer points of the acting much more visible, which probably contributed to my feeling much more affected by last night's performance. During Vere's interview with Claggart when the accusations against Budd are first laid, the 2nd Lieutenant remained at the side of the arena, glowering at the prommers, I found myself taking my hands out of my pockets and standing up straight). The details's of Vere's performance certainly brought out the introverted sie of him to me, and there were nice touches such as his interaction with the middies who were being instructed in the use of the sextant just before the French ship was sighted (unlike one reviewer, I didn't see anything untoward in that, it was a normal part of a captain's duties at the time)

[edashtav]

The discussion was very good, but although I hardly dare say so (given the general praise) I have some reservations about the performance. It may have been different in the hall, but I didn't really like Padmore's Vere. I prefer a more thoughtful, introverted Vere, and his anguish didn't come across subtly enough for my taste. Claggart wasn't as terrifying as I expected from the reviews. Jacques Imbrailo's frog in the throat at key moments was unfortunate, and prevented me from getting truly involved in his performance - which I was when I saw him in the filmed version.

Apart from those things, which are fairly important, it was wonderful, and I'm sure the semi-staging would have tempered my concerns. What an opera.

INDEED! I rate it as Britten's finest!

[VodkaDilc]

Despite being a great fan of BB - and BB in particular - I did not book tickets for this Prom on the grounds that I had been so blown away by the ENO production last year that I thought a non-theatre production would be an anti-climax. Was I wrong?

[Alison]

Three cheers for Sir Andrew (and the London Philharmonic).

Often dullish, he's virtually peerless in Britten, Tippett and Messiaen.

[edashtav]

Three cheers for Sir Andrew (and the London Philharmonic).

Often dullish, he's virtually peerless in Britten, Tippett and Messiaen.

That's perceptive, Alison.

[PhilipT]

Despite being a great fan of BB - and BB in particular - I did not book tickets for this Prom on the grounds that I had been so blown away by the ENO production last year that I thought a non-theatre production would be an anti-climax. Was I wrong?

It fully qualified as semi-staged - entrances and exits, full costumes, many props, much of the action (including the fight scene, Vere pouring wine from a ship's decanter, Dansker tying the hangman's noose and the hanging itself, but not the bracing of the yards), and as David says above, good use of the display screens at the back of the platform to indicate where the action was (quarterdeck, Vere's cabin, below decks). The special effects were missing (e.g. the mist).

[Maclintick]

Despite being a great fan of BB - and BB in particular - I did not book tickets for this Prom on the grounds that I had been so blown away by the ENO production last year that I thought a non-theatre production would be an anti-climax. Was I wrong?

Yes, Vodkadilc, I fear you were. Mark Padmore's star ( "starry" ?) turn as Vere was truly magnetic. Kim Begley's more traditionally scholarly portrayal at ENO last year was very much in the Pears mould, but Padmore gave us a character who we could believe would really stick it to "those damned mounseers" when he wasn't mugging up his Plutarch. The numerical superiority of the ENO chorus proved telling in the big numbers, conjuring a Force 10 that nearly swept us out of our Coliseum seats in "Blow her to Hilo". By comparison, in the vast space of the Albert Hall the excellent Glyndebourners were outgunned by the LPO percussion at crucial moments - Britten's orchestral panoply brilliantly realised by Sir Andrew & his players, masquerading as massed naval bands one moment, then producing beautifully hushed sonorities for Billy in the Darbies.

Was Claggart Evil Enough ? Brindley Sherratt was vocally menacing with none of the homo-erotic touches of ENO's Matthew Rose,
but perhaps any such subtleties were lost except to the Prommers on the rail. To his credit he didn't become a Pantomime villain. In the past, Britten & his librettists Forster & Crozier have been criticised for a simplistic incarnation of Absolute Evil, whose psychopathology nowadays seems medieval to modern audiences conditioned to having everything neatly medicalised, but it's salutary to remember that in 1945, just prior to the gestation period of Billy Budd, Britten had performed with Yehudi Menuhin at the newly-liberated Belsen camp, & later commented that the revelation of the Holocaust had coloured all his subsequent work, as it did that of his great contemporary William Golding.

[David Underdown]

and as David says above, good use of the display screens at the back of the platform to indicate where the action was (quarterdeck, Vere's cabin, below decks). The special effects were missing (e.g. the mist).

The mist was also shown on the display screens (rather than keeping in place the smoke machine used before the Hollywood Prom the previous day!)

[Ferretfancy]

I think the scene was also compared - unfavorably to Gilbert & Sullivan by some critics

It was Ernest Newman who said that the ending of Act 1 reminded him of HMS Pinafore, a stupid comment that stung Britten deeply. One thing that I did notice was the similarity in some passages to the writing for male voices in some of Percy Grainger's settings. As an example, there is a resemblance to the setting of the folksong Shallow Brown as the chorus declaim 'Starry Vere!'
Britain admired Grainger, and well after Billy Budd he recorded works by him, including Shallow Brown with John Shirley Quirk and chorus, perhaps an earlier memory of the piece stayed in his mind?

[edashtav]

It was Ernest Newman who said that the ending of Act 1 reminded him of HMS Pinafore, a stupid comment that stung Britten deeply. One thing that I did notice was the similarity in some passages to the writing for male voices in some of Percy Grainger's settings. As an example, there is a resemblance to the setting of the folksong Shallow Brown as the chorus declaim 'Starry Vere!'
Britain admired Grainger, and well after Billy Budd he recorded works by him, including Shallow Brown with John Shirley Quirk and chorus, perhaps an earlier memory of the piece stayed in his mind?

Well-spotted, FF. Britten's fine LP was my introduction to Shallow Brown - it made made a deep impression upon me and I can, thanks to you, see that Britten was influenced.

[bluestateprommer]

Sebastian Petit's review concludes - para 3: "But a nearly full Hall was held, hardly daring to breathe, for the full length of the exit..."

You could feel and rejoice in the moment over the airwaves. Deeply satisfying.

Even weeks after, I still remember this moment over iPlayer, as one could hear the trudging tread of Mark Padmore as the aged Vere walking down the bull run to that palpable silence at the end, before the applause erupted. The whole performance came off very well indeed, and I envy those present in the RAH.

The whole Britten vs. Tippett issue that arose in the thread on The Midsummer Marriage does bring up an interesting contrast of TMM with Budd. If TMM suffers from the fault of head-scratching opacity in its text, Budd can suffer from the perhaps excessive clarity of some of its lines, in particular with respect to referring to Billy Budd as "beauty", not difficult to glean the homoerotic subtext. Interpreted the wrong way, those lines can come off as unintentionally campy. Yet even if this was E.M. Forster's first (and I suppose only) opera libretto, worked on in collaboration with Eric Crozier and BB, the fact that, as mentioned in the other thread, Forster had doubts would indicate a degree of detached self-awareness of his limitations that Tippett seemed to lack.

I would also respectfully dissent from fhg's characterization in the TMM thread that Britten's libretti were "two dimensional". In the case of the BB libretto, for example, there are several pithy and subtle insights that apply beyond the surface plot. In fact, for me, one classic case of this is this brief exchange between Donald and Dansker, reflecting on Billy:

"Donald: He's a good cuss, is Billy.

Dansker: He's too good. There's his whole trouble."

This actually reminded me of the passage in, of all places, Machiavelli's The Prince at the start of Chapter XV, this excerpt (using the Gutenberg.org translation):

"....a man who wishes to act entirely up to his professions of virtue soon meets with what destroys him among so much that is evil.

Hence it is necessary for a prince wishing to hold his own to know how to do wrong, and to make use of it or not according to necessity."

This ties in clearly to the passage between Dansker and Billy at the end of Act I, where Billy just can't see that Claggart is evil, despite Dansker's effort to get Billy to wake up to reality. Actually, the contrast between Billy's blind psychological innocence and Claggart's corruption is a perfect example of everyday office politics, where Claggart is all too good at getting others to do his dirty work for him. As the Sailing Master said in Act II, after the fatal deed, "No one liked him", but because Claggart, on the surface, did his duty, he got away with everything. (I know people like this all too well at work.)