2/12/1949 LIVE Benjamin Britten PETER GRIMES MET Radio Broadcast Acetate TIBBETT

$

50

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2/12/1949 LIVE MET Radio Broadcast Acetate recording of the revival of the 1948 MET premiere

Benjamin Britten PETER GRIMES

complete recording includes the opening and closing announcements

Great sound quality

Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," which was added to the Metropolitan Opera repertory last year, will have its first performance of this season on Jan. 21 in the company's eighth week, starting Jan. 17. In a cast, which essentially duplicates last year's, Lawrence Tibbett will sing his first Captain Balstrode and Margaret Harshaw her first Auntie.

On Jan 21 Tibbett also celebrated his MET Silver Jubilee after the performance

Here is the cast list of the 1948 premiere

PETER GRIMES 
Britten-Slater

Peter Grimes............Frederick Jagel
Ellen Orford............Regina Resnik
Captain Balstrode.......John Brownlee
Mrs. Sedley.............Martha Lipton
Auntie..................Claramae Turner
Niece...................Paula Lenchner
Niece...................Maxine Stellman
Hobson..................Philip Kinsman
Swallow.................Jerome Hines
Bob Boles...............Thomas Hayward
Rev. Horace Adams.......John Garris
Ned Keene...............Hugh Thompson
Lawyer..................Lodovico Oliviero
Fisherwoman.............Thelma Altman
Fisherman...............Lawrence Davidson
Thorp...................Orrin Hill
John....................Peggy Smithers

Conductor...............Emil Cooper

Director................Dino Yannopoulos
Set designer............Joseph Novak
Costume designer........Mary Percy Schenck

7x 10" double sided 33 rpm acetate records in generic album with Britten picture from the premiere pasted on cover

Condition: EXCELLENT acetates are undamaged and play quiet and great. Some white waxy haze on record can be removed with some mineral spirits. Album great, sleeves split at bottom

Review of Virgil Thomson in the Herald Tribune

Success Tactics

Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes," which was added last night to the repertory of our Metropolitan Opera, is a success. It always is. Given in any language, in a house of any size, it always holds the attention of an audience. As given last night "the works," so to speak, which is to say, the full mechanism, musical and scenic, of a mammoth production establishment, it still held the attention.

This is not to minimize the excellences of the present production, which are many, or the care that has gone into it, which is considerable. It is merely to point out that the steam-roller processing that our beloved Met, geared to Wagner, puts any new work through is one of the severest tests known for the strengths of theatrical materials. If Mr. Britten's work came out scarcely in English, vocally loud from beginning to end and decorated in a manner both ugly and hopelessly anachronistic, it also came through the ordeal with its music still alive and its human drama still touching.

Make no mistake about "Peter Grimes." It is varied, interesting and solidly put together. It works. It is not a piece of any unusual flavor or distinction. It adds nothing to the history of the stage or to the history of music. But it is a rattling good repertory melodrama, and if the executant artists, beginning with Emil Cooper who conducted, going on through Frederick Jagel and Regina Resnik, who sang the tenor and soprano leads, to the smallest role in a large cast and even including the chorus, treated the work with no consideration for its special or poetic subject-matter, but rather as disembodied, or "pure," theater, just "wow" material, that is exactly what the composer himself has done, what his score invites and asks for.

There is everything in it to make an opera pleasing and effective. There is a trial scene, a boat, a church (with organ music), a pub (with drinking song for the full ensemble), a storm, a night club seen through a window (with boogie-woogie music off stage and shadow play), a scene of flagellation, a mad scene and a death. There are set pieces galore, all different, all musically imaginative and mostly fun. And there are a good half-dozen intermezzos, most of which are musically pretty weak, but expressive all the same.

The musical structure of the opera is simple and efficient. Everything and everybody has a motif, a tune or turn of phrase that identifies. The entire orchestral structure and most of the vocal is pieced together out of these, in the manner of Italian verismo. The harmony is a series of pedal points broadly laid out to hold together the bits-and-pieces motif continuity. There is no pretense of musical development through these motifs, as in Wagner. They are pure identification tags, as in Dwight Fiske. The music is wholly objective and calculated for easy effect. That is why it works.

It works even in spite of its none too happy handling of English vowel quantities. It sacrifices these systematically, in fact, to characteristic melodic turns, as if the composer had counted from the beginning on translation. A good part of the obscurity that was characteristic of last night's diction, in spite of the singers' visible effort to project sung speech, was due to the deliberate, falsity of the prosodic line. Mr. Britten is apparently no more bothered about such niceties than he is by the anachronisms of an almost popishly High-Church service in an English fishing village of 1830 and an American jazz band in the same time and place. He has gone out for theatrical effects, got them, got his success. So did the Metropolitan. And still his opera is not a bore.

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