"Peter Grimes" on beach is Britten 100 highlight

LONDON (Reuters) - Benjamin Britten's searing opera "Peter Grimes" about a sadistic fisherman will be performed in June 2013 on the beach in the English coastal town that inspired it as part of a year-long centenary for the British composer who died in 1976.

"We're going to put a stage on the beach and do it," Jonathan Reekie, chief executive of Aldeburgh Music, the music festival Britten founded and named for the east-coast town where the opera takes place, said on Tuesday at the launch of the Britten 100 celebration.

Promoted as "the widest ever celebration of a British composer", the festivities will include performances of Britten's works by orchestras, opera companies and conductors in 140 cities in 30 countries, plus a project to get 75,000 British schoolchildren to sing his music on "Friday Afternoons" all over the country, leading up to a big birthday bash on November 22.

The Royal Mint is pitching in with the announcement that it will produce a new 50-pence coin depicting Britten, to go into circulation at the end of the year, and New York will have a year-long focus on his works, organizers said.

There will be performances of Britten's pieces everywhere from Beijing to Moscow, which will see its first staging of the openly homosexual Britten's most overtly homosexual opera, "Death in Venice", based on Thomas Mann's novel.

"The extraordinary scope of the plans announced today underlines Britten's truly global appeal and status as one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century," Richard Jarman, director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, named for the composer and his companion, tenor Peter Pears, said.

"He believed that music should be written to appeal directly to the listener and he wrote some of the most approachable music of the 20th century," Jarman, whose foundation will invest 6.5 million pounds ($10.41 million) in the centenary, added.

As part of the celebration, cellist Matthew Barley will perform Britten's works in what are described as "unexpected places" across Britain, including not only concert halls and cathedrals but also shops, galleries, schools, cafes, heritage sites, woodlands and a rare performance in The Red House, where Britten and Pears lived and worked together in the close-knit Sussex fishing town of Aldeburgh.

An undoubted highlight will be the performance of "Peter Grimes" on the beach in the town where, in the opera, the townsfolk turn against the obsessed, abusive and anti-social fisherman Grimes, who has lost two young apprentices in accidents, and force him to row out to sea in his fishing boat and drown himself.

The opera, which had its premiere in 1945 at Sadler's Wells in London, was an instant hit and was performed in two dozen opera houses over the next three years, establishing Britten as a major force in 20th century music.

"'Peter Grimes' is a rare example of an opera that is set in a real place that can be seen and readily identified today, so virtually all the settings of the opera are real places in the town of Aldeburgh. they exist today," Reekie said.

"For anybody who's encountered the opera, it's impossible to stand on Aldeburgh beach and hear the sound of the shingle, the sound of the sea, the wheeling of seagulls and not connect it to the music."

English tenor Alan Oke will sing the role of Grimes and Steuart Bedford, a Britten prot?g?, will conduct the production in which local people, for whom Britten always had a lot of affection, will appear, Reekie said.

He added that the opera will be mounted on a more elaborate stage than those used for rock concerts, but no "grandstand seating" would be provided for the audience.

"If it rains, they'll get wet," he said. "But the opera includes a storm scene."

($1 = 0.6246 British pounds)

(Editing by Paul Casciato)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/peter-grimes-beach-britten-100-highlight-131959280.html

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