The H.M.S. Indomitable will be sailing across the Atlantic early in 2014, as Glyndebourne's much-admired production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd heads for the US. The staging, by Michael Grandage, will play at BAM from Feb. 7 through Feb. 13.
If it's a little late for Britten's big anniversary year, perhaps that's a sign that 2013 has awoken a more active interest in the composer's works in the US than has previously been the case (Britten, while admired, has generally been a notoriously if inexplicably hard sell to American audiences). Despite one early review that likened a passage in the opera to Sullivan's comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore -- a comparison that infuriated Britten so much that he reworked the opera to expunge the offending passage -- the mixture of seafaring action, moral complexities and incredible music has ensured a constant flow of revivals. With the exception perhaps of Peter Grimes, Budd remains probably Britten's most popular opera.
And this production has a theatricality and atmosphere that will be familiar to those familiar with Grandage's many 'straight' theater productions, perhaps the most operatic of which was Schiller's Don Carlos (in the West End and Sheffield). Although Grandage, former artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, has made four Broadway appearances as director (Evita, Red, Hamlet and Frost/Nixon) his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in 2011 with Don Giovanni was critically panned. It was an unaccustomed misstep by the popular director (also in fairness one hit by an important cast injury at the last minute), one which this excellent Budd should go a long way to redeem.
At Glyndebourne the 2010 production has had two airings. The first cast featured John Mark Ainsley, Jacques Imbrailo and Philip Ens with Sir Mark Elder in the pit, while the 2013 "stupendous revival" (according to the Daily Telegraph) retained Imbrailo, who were joined by Mark Padmore and Brindley Sherratt with Sir Andrew Davis conducting.
It is however Elder who will lead the show to BAM, of whose account of the score The Guardian described as, "by turns luminous and scaldingly intense...Elder does not neglect a single detail of what is perhaps Britten's greatest orchestral accomplishment." Glyndebourne's resident orchestra, the London Philharmonic, as well as the Glyndebourne Chorus, will travel with the opera.
