Your events at Classical Events
Details
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Southbank Centre
Belvedere Rd
South Bank
London
SE1 8XX
England
Programme
Benjamin Britten – Peter Grimes, Op.33
Performers
John Hudson – tenor
Mari Wyn Williams – soprano
Nicholas Folwell – baritone
Nicholas Morris – baritone
Epiphoni Consort
Other concerts in this Series (+)
Programme Note
Kensington Symphony Orchestra returns to Queen Elizabeth Hall for a concert performance of Britten’s Peter Grimes. Music director Russell Keable welcomes the Epiphoni Consort and 12 exciting singers, including the tenor John Hudson (Peter Grimes), the soprano Mari Wyn Williams (Ellen Orford) and the baritones Nicholas Morris (Ned Keene) and Nicholas Folwell (Captain Balstrode).
Britten’s opera was conceived in the US, where the composer was living in the early years of the Second World War, and was completed on his return to the UK in 1943. Described by the Manchester Guardian on its première as “a kind of white-hot poetry”, it depicts ”a subject very close to my heart: the struggle of the individual against the masses”, Britten said.
Montagu Slater’s libretto for the work was based on George Crabbe’s poem The Borough (1810); the fisherman Peter Grimes lives and works in a fictional town similar to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where Crabbe and later Britten lived. Grimes, wrongly accused by townsfolk of murdering his apprentice, appoints another with the help of Ellen Orford, the schoolmistress he wishes to marry – but when another accident happens, a mob is roused to fury and the tale reaches a tragic end.
