Britten's music is not for all tastes. I for one like and am intrigued by his style. Owen Wingrave is not my favourite opera of his, but any Britten opera is worth hearing and Owen Wingrave is no exception. This is a really wonderful performance. Of the two performances I've seen, this and the Gerald Finley film this is the better one for me. Finley's was interesting but not without its problems. Part of the reason why I prefer this performance is that as it is a live performance it has more immediacy and spontaneity. Here, the costumes and sets have the right amount of atmosphere and elegance, and the orchestral playing and conducting are first rate, hair-raising and reflective when they needs to be. The staging is always involving, especially in the creepy climax, yet brings out the tragedy of the opera with a great deal of intelligence. The characters are still interesting, especially the protagonist and the secondary roles are much more fleshed-out than they are in the Finley version. The singing is just terrific. Benjamin Luxon is a powerful and moving Wingrave, while Sylvia Fisher is splendidly belligerent and fearsome as his fearsome aunt. Jennifer Vyvan and Heather Harper are sympathetic as Kate and Mrs. Coyle, and John Shirley-Quirk's Spencer is beautifully sung and characterised as you would expect. Peter Pears as Sir Phillip sings with his usual musicianship and intelligence. All in all, simply wonderful, how Britten should be sung and staged. 10/10 Bethany Cox
2 Reviews
Absolutely amazing
Dr_Coulardeau24 October 2016
Warning: Spoilers
This opera was written and composed for the BBC, hence as a television opera in 1971, a long time still before high definition. The medium imposed some strict limitations and they are used more than tolerated all along. The first one is the narrow and shallow range of the TV camera and screen. The opera is systematically shot inside rather small rooms entirely closed up. In the same way this medium could not overload the picture with a lot of details and props and sure enough the setting is not overloaded and when the audience is supposed to look at a detail in the picture the camera zooms onto it and it becomes a close-up shot. That is typical with the portraits at the beginning. We are shown them one after the other in chronological order and with a zooming movement onto one section of them when necessary.
The second element that is typical of television (or cinema actually) is the editing of the whole opera. By editing you can shift from one setting to another without any kind of loss of time or movement. You can thus shift from one character's close-up shot to another character's close-up shot without any movement of the camera. That gives dynamism and flexibility to the visual story because television like cinema is telling us a visual story. Think of the various settings that do not have to me materially changed on the stage.
The third element that is used all along is the fact that due to the low definition of television in those days if you wanted to show the feelings and emotions of the characters you had to give a close-up shot of their faces, which implied the actors, and in this case singers too, had to work on their facial language, part of the general body language. On a stage the body language is essentially carried by the general movement of the body or of the limbs, particularly the arms. At the same time it also uses the general posture of the body and particularly the position and direction/orientation of the head.. On television the general posture is not that interesting because we can have closer shots that can focus on the face with eventually the eyes looking straight at the audience (meaning the camera), the upper half of the body, one arm movement, a hand even, etc. I must say that in this production the actors-singers are rather stiff in their general postures and movements but they have worked a lot on their facial expressions, which are rather secondary on an opera stage, even if the spectators have binoculars.
A last note on this DVD is that it must have been re-mastered and enhanced for modern big TV screen. We cannot know what receiving it on the small screens of the time could have been. Note though color TV had already arrived though the majority of TV sets must have been black and white. Color TV was introduced on BBC 2 for Wimbledon coverage on Saturday, July 1, 1967. The launch of the BBC 2 full color service took place on December 2, 1967. Some British TV programs, however, had been produced in color even before the introduction of color television in 1967, for the purpose of sales to American, Canadian, and Filipino networks. Full-time color broadcasts had been running since 1969. Full nationwide color broadcasting was achieved in 1976. This opera was thus received in black and white by a vast proportion of people either because their territory was not covered or because they did not have a color TV. And actually this production works a lot on darker colors that would have appeared as close to black or dark grey on a black and white set, at least many shades of grey. The amount of brown and even dark brown is extremely important.
The last element is at the level of special effects. This production only uses fading in and fading out as an editing technique that is slightly softer than cut and paste, particularly to change from one scene to another or one moment in one scene to the next. The other special effect is the blurring out of the picture around the face of a character to express the inner language of the character who is thus speaking to himself or herself and not to the other people on the stage. It isolates each character.
I insisted here on some of the technical means used in this production that cannot be used on an opera stage and are also adapted to the low definition of the TV picture at the time. A cinema production would gave been quite different because of the high definition of the cinema picture. I also believe a TV production today would be different because of the high definition of the digital TV image. The opera was probably shot with cinema standards, particularly the camera.
Without planning on exploiting the whole plot because I have already said a lot about it when analyzing the libretto (see ISBN-13: 978- 0571515424 on Amazon.com, Amzon.co.uk & Amazon.fr), I will insist here on the opera in this very production considering it was the original vision Benjamin Britten had since it was done with him.
The Prelude or Overture of the first act introduces us to the various pictures of ancestors hanging in the hall of Paramore. But instead of having a travelling picture we have a shift from one to the next and the camera stops on each one to have a full vision of each picture and at the same time zooms onto the top section of the body of some pictures. The names and dates of each picture is provided super-impressed onto the picture itself for a short instant, but long enough for us to be able to read them. It is interesting to list them. . . [...]
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
The second element that is typical of television (or cinema actually) is the editing of the whole opera. By editing you can shift from one setting to another without any kind of loss of time or movement. You can thus shift from one character's close-up shot to another character's close-up shot without any movement of the camera. That gives dynamism and flexibility to the visual story because television like cinema is telling us a visual story. Think of the various settings that do not have to me materially changed on the stage.
The third element that is used all along is the fact that due to the low definition of television in those days if you wanted to show the feelings and emotions of the characters you had to give a close-up shot of their faces, which implied the actors, and in this case singers too, had to work on their facial language, part of the general body language. On a stage the body language is essentially carried by the general movement of the body or of the limbs, particularly the arms. At the same time it also uses the general posture of the body and particularly the position and direction/orientation of the head.. On television the general posture is not that interesting because we can have closer shots that can focus on the face with eventually the eyes looking straight at the audience (meaning the camera), the upper half of the body, one arm movement, a hand even, etc. I must say that in this production the actors-singers are rather stiff in their general postures and movements but they have worked a lot on their facial expressions, which are rather secondary on an opera stage, even if the spectators have binoculars.
A last note on this DVD is that it must have been re-mastered and enhanced for modern big TV screen. We cannot know what receiving it on the small screens of the time could have been. Note though color TV had already arrived though the majority of TV sets must have been black and white. Color TV was introduced on BBC 2 for Wimbledon coverage on Saturday, July 1, 1967. The launch of the BBC 2 full color service took place on December 2, 1967. Some British TV programs, however, had been produced in color even before the introduction of color television in 1967, for the purpose of sales to American, Canadian, and Filipino networks. Full-time color broadcasts had been running since 1969. Full nationwide color broadcasting was achieved in 1976. This opera was thus received in black and white by a vast proportion of people either because their territory was not covered or because they did not have a color TV. And actually this production works a lot on darker colors that would have appeared as close to black or dark grey on a black and white set, at least many shades of grey. The amount of brown and even dark brown is extremely important.
The last element is at the level of special effects. This production only uses fading in and fading out as an editing technique that is slightly softer than cut and paste, particularly to change from one scene to another or one moment in one scene to the next. The other special effect is the blurring out of the picture around the face of a character to express the inner language of the character who is thus speaking to himself or herself and not to the other people on the stage. It isolates each character.
I insisted here on some of the technical means used in this production that cannot be used on an opera stage and are also adapted to the low definition of the TV picture at the time. A cinema production would gave been quite different because of the high definition of the cinema picture. I also believe a TV production today would be different because of the high definition of the digital TV image. The opera was probably shot with cinema standards, particularly the camera.
Without planning on exploiting the whole plot because I have already said a lot about it when analyzing the libretto (see ISBN-13: 978- 0571515424 on Amazon.com, Amzon.co.uk & Amazon.fr), I will insist here on the opera in this very production considering it was the original vision Benjamin Britten had since it was done with him.
The Prelude or Overture of the first act introduces us to the various pictures of ancestors hanging in the hall of Paramore. But instead of having a travelling picture we have a shift from one to the next and the camera stops on each one to have a full vision of each picture and at the same time zooms onto the top section of the body of some pictures. The names and dates of each picture is provided super-impressed onto the picture itself for a short instant, but long enough for us to be able to read them. It is interesting to list them. . . [...]
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU
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