Opera review: Billy Budd
Billy Budd ****
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
There were equally fine performances from Roderick Williams in wonderfully rich voice as a surprisingly sturdy, thoroughly likeable Billy, and Alastair Miles, gratifyingly balanced as the sinister Claggart, deeply unsettling in his manipulations of the young and vulnerable, but far from a panto villain in his struggles with his own deep damage.
Indeed, Phelan’s honest, intelligent production achieves a fine sense of balance with Britten and librettist EM Forster’s homoerotic subtext, never concealing it, but never overplaying it either – instead leaving it to fester under the surface, and to inform both the opera’s warm, seafaring camaraderie and its darker moments.
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Hide AdTwo elements really stood out: first, Opera North’s superb chorus, wonderfully roof-raising in the opera’s aborted battle scene but equally eloquent in its ominous opening; and second, Opera North’s equally superb orchestra, which delivered a brilliantly vivid, sharply etched account under conductor Garry Walker, full of surging drama and also moments of exquisite contemplation. This is a glorious, thoughtful production, as strong on technical accomplishment as it is on insight.