In Billy Budd, they do.If the accompaniment is exceptional and the movement well-drilled, so too is the singing. Though Simon Keenlyside (Billy) is too complex a performer – and perhaps now too mature – to convince me that he is the sweet innocent of Melville’s imagining, his physical and vocal artistry are stunning. Save for a few imbalances during the Sea Shanties, Andrew Litton’s command of the score is faultless. The sea-hues of greens and blues are beautifully separated, the choruses subtly shaped, the dynamics minutely intensified and relaxed. During the second performance, I realised that I had heard this orchestra play well before but had never thought them to have a lovely sound. Yet Billy Budd is also one of Britten’s most perfectly constructed scores: a smooth arc of reflection, action, social unrest, dry-mouthed desire, and elemental violence.
Tempting as it is to attribute the excellence of this production to Blitz spirit, a more prosaic explanation for ENO’s success with Billy Budd is the uniformly high standard of casting, direction and conducting.
The opulence of his suffering goes beyond anything imagined by Puccini, Strauss or Janacek. The character of Billy shares the blithe, passive beauty of Snow White and the exquisite martyrdom of an early saint. Whether Melville intended his story to be a metaphor for suppressed sexuality or not, Britten’s voyeuristic tragedy is as far out of the closet as you can get without having packed up the closet and taken it down to the Salvation Army. With its luxuriant undertow of homo-eroticism, its brutal sadism, its all-male cast, and, in designer Brian Thomson’s hydraulic abstraction of HMS Indomitable, its giant Meccano set, Billy Budd is a boys-only opera. Yet still the shows go on, some of them – such as Neil Armfield’s 1998 Opera Australia/Welsh National Opera production of Billy Budd – very good indeed. For those who came late to opera, the Stevie Smith-style resignation of artistic director Sean Doran is but the latest disaster in what has been a dismal half-decade for an organisation whose anthropophagy is rivalled only by the Conservative Party. As ill as he’d been, his death still came as a sickening shock.
Kevin Coyne had been so strong for so long that we’d come to believe that voice would never go away; we thought it would go on singing for ever. And in a way – through Underground – it does.’Underground’ costs £11 from www.kevincoyne.de. Like pea-soupers, probity and politeness, the “powerhouse” era at English National Opera has acquired the patina of ancient history. She is the love of my life.”That night he kept working at a macabre picture which showed the prone body of a man with a second, sinister figure peering over him. Unusually for Coyne, he couldn’t finish it.At 5.30am on 2 December, his wife woke up.”He was standing in the room,” Helmi told me, “and he said, quite calmly: ‘I think I am going to die now.’ For a moment I thought it was one of his jokes I put my arms around him He seemed to fall asleep again I was dozing When I woke up he was smiling but his eyes were closed I didn’t need to call a doctor. I knew.”I was in Zimbabwe when Helmi called to say her husband had died.
