”Glitter of waves…”

Oct 04, 2011

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When the wine critic Malcolm Gluck was asked “So go on then, what’s your favourite wine?”, his response was always the same. “It has to be the wine in my glass right now”.

I try to be like that no matter what repertoire we might be performing, and try to at least communicate to the audience that this piece, right now, is the greatest piece ever written. Of course, this is more difficult sometimes than others, but does at least lead me to think that if I don’t have a favourite piece, then there are a number of pieces that resonate more deeply for me than others. 

Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from his masterwork opera “Peter Grimes” (which open this Friday’s concert) is definitely one such piece. The interludes far exceed their theatrical function as scene change music, working to reinforce the opera’s central themes of the corruption of innocence, and fear of “otherness” in society. They are also our finest examples of musical landscape (or even seascape) depiction, from the keening seagulls of the opening, to the cold glassy stillness of a Sunday morning in a decrepit fishing village, the surge of a moonlit sea, and finally the malignant force of the North Sea in the grip of the storm. 

The action in “Peter Grimes” all occurs in The Borough, a thinly veiled disguise for Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast, where Britten lived almost his entire adult life, and where, as a student, I finally realised what I would have to do to become a professional musician. It is also where I met my wife, and where we returned six years later to get married in the little church which sits at the top of the town, overlooking an often brown, churning sea.

So for me, this really is a piece which resonates, as deeply as those church bells which ring in Grimes’ and my Aldeburgh.

Patrick McCarthy

(Principal Trumpet No.2)