Word: grimeses
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The Metropolitan has been trumpeting a good deal about its new opera, Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes." I suspect that the fanfare has been, at least in part, an attempt to cover its neglect of modern opera, for "Grimes" seems to be the only work in the current repertoire that...
"Peter Grimes" was commissioned by the Kousscvitzky Foundation in 1945 and received its first performance under Boris Goldovsky's direction at Tanglewood in 1946. It takes a turn back to pre-Wagnerian opera with recitative and arias. The orchestra is subordinated to action on the state, though, judging by Thursday...
"Grimes" is not a very good argument for opera in English, and it cannot fall back on the translation excuse. The fault lies with librettist Montagu Slater. He doesn't seem to think in musical terms, so that there is a lot of pretty tedious recitative, much of which is...
Of course, the Met's "Grimes" is done in the grand manner, and this detracts somewhat, particularly in the case of the oversized chorus which exceeds the stage capacity. The direction is much better than the usual variety, however, in spite of some sloppy moments. In the second scene of...
John Horne Burns does not waste words. In a phrase or two, he can put across far more than could paragraphs of pedantic description. Consider his characterization of Mr. Philbrick Grimes, the school busybody, who "zoomed into Princeton at seventeen," and "Kept up a figurative rubbing all the time he...