The Covent Garden Opera Company promises for its fortnight╒s visit to the Manchester Palace a repertory that ought to whet the appetites of all music-lovers in the North. This touring company brings one modern opera that has not been given before in Manchester and older works that will be presented with a fullness of resource in music, action, and staging that has not been known here for many years. Last night the two weeks╒ season opened with that macabre and almost fiercely discussed work ╥Peter Grimes.╙ It is probably the best thing Britten has done and certainly his most interesting opera: but though powerfully moving in its strongest scenes and often salted with the composer╒s peculiarly mordant wit the music, which indulges throughout in extreme dissonance, varies in quality. The libretto is an exacting one. There are stretches of rather flat-footed drama where the attempt to fuse music and words in an imaginative combine could scarcely be judged except in terms of relative success. Crabbe╒s sinister story of the fisherman╒s morose and sadistic nature has been put by Montagu Slater into more shapely though not less poignant lines, yet bare patches occur in the work where dramatic action seems to be frustrated. As a matter of hard fact there are too many words, and in spite of the cleverness Britten has shown in setting them the continuous syllabic effect sometimes becomes irritating. His music is not sufficiently large-scaled to spread a cumulative emotional tension; its triumphs consist in a series of brilliant, separate, picturesque sections cunningly welded. The final scenes are particularly impressive and notable for their lyrical beauty.
