[Met Performance] CID:307930
Billy Budd {34} Matinee Broadcast ed. Metropolitan Opera House: 04/4/1992., Broadcast
(Debut: Andrew Stewart
Broadcast
Review)
Metropolitan Opera House
April 4, 1992 Matinee Broadcast
BILLY BUDD {34}
Britten-Forster/Crozier
Billy Budd..............Thomas Hampson
Captain Vere............Graham Clark
Claggart................James Morris
Mr. Redburn.............Alan Held
Mr. Flint...............James Courtney
Mr. Ratcliffe...........Julien Robbins
Donald..................Gordon Hawkins
Squeak..................Bernard Fitch
Dansker.................John Macurdy
Novice..................Anthony Laciura
Novice's Friend.........Mark Oswald
Red Whiskers............John Horton Murray
Arthur Jones............Nico Castel
Bosun...................Morley Meredith
First Mate..............Jeffrey Wells
Second Mate.............Herbert Perry
Maintop.................Michael Forest
Sailor..................Sven Leaf
Gunner's Mate...........Glenn Bater
Cabin Boy...............Andrew Stewart [Debut]
Midshipman..............Joel Evans
Midshipman..............Peter Niles
Midshipman..............Benjamin Schott
Midshipman..............Joseph Silverman
Conductor...............Charles Mackerras
Production..............John Dexter
Staged by...............Bruce Donnell
Designer................William Dudley
Lighting designer.......Gil Wechsler
Billy Budd received five performances this season.
Rebroadcast on Sirius Metropolitan Opera Radio
Review of Tim Page in Newsday
Met Magic For 'Budd'
The Metropolitan Opera's production of Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd," created by the late John Dexter, has long been acclaimed one of the company's most satisfying. On Saturday afternoon, it returned to the repertory with a superb cast - Graham Clark, James Morris, and Thomas Hampson in the title role - and a conductor, Sir Charles Mackerras, who understands Britten's esthetic with rare acuity. For those who are moved by the opera (or those who have not yet seen it), a visit to the Met should be a priority.
Myself, I like the Met's production of "Billy Budd" more than I like "Billy Budd," and I found Saturday's performance entirely admirable and quite unmoving. I'm not sure "Billy Budd, Foretopman," Herman Melville's complex, discursive meditation on good and evil, was natural material for stage adaptation - it is, in its own way, as interior a work as "Under the Volcano" or "Ulysses" - and I don't find Britten's music particularly inspired.
Indeed, to this taste, the all-male voices make for a timbral sameness that grows wearisome over the opera's 2 1/2 hours, and there is a drab, gray quality to the score that can't all be explained away as musical "seascape." Moreover, the homoeroticism in the stage action - highly charged, determinedly suppressed and oh, so serious - calls to mind nothing so much as the old Saturday Night Live skit with John Belushi as the captain of a sado-masochistic pirate ship. Sacrilege, of course, but there it is.
Still, what a magnificent, sympathetic production this remains; I don't think the cast could have been much bettered. Thomas Hampson is an ideal Billy Budd - he looks like the handsome sailor on the old cartons of Player's Navy Cut, acts convincingly and sings with lyricism and luster. Graham Clark vividly conveyed the fundamentally decent Captain Vere, adrift in a mist of moral ambiguity (if one cannot help but feel the choice Vere makes is dunderheaded in the extreme - and not very likely either, on any sort of human level - well, that's symbolism for you). Finally, James Morris was malevolence incarnate in the role of Claggart: he had but to walk onstage and the mood darkened. If there is a finer singing actor now before the public, he has not yet come to my attention. The worthy cast also included Morley Meredith, Anthony Laciura, John Horton Murray, Nico Castel and John Macurdy.
The Met orchestra plays very differently for Mackerras than for its music director, James Levine. Levine stresses an aggressive brilliance and virtuosity; Mackerras summons a united, unified reserve, entirely appropriate to the material at hand. Whatever one thinks of the opera itself, the Met surpasses itself with this "Billy Budd."