Buried Treasure

In June 2013, the Aldeburgh Festival celebrated the centenary of its founder, Benjamin Britten, by brutalizing his music. “Grimes on the Beach,” a production of the opera “Peter Grimes” that was performed over three nights on the very shoreline that first gave George Crabbe, and then Britten, a setting for their stories of Suffolk fisherfolk life, submerged the composer’s achievement in a site-specific storm of ambient sound. The orchestra was reduced to a recording, captured earlier in the week in the concert hall a few miles up the road at Snape Maltings, then squeezed through a hundred tiny speakers. The soloists were amplified, their voices disembodied, enunciating a few feet in front of each section of the audience, as their owners’ mouths opened and closed 50 yards back. The chorus maintained an increasingly heroic focus on Britten’s matrix of time signatures despite the drizzle in their eyes and the unrelenting beat and hiss of the tide. The combined effect was less a carefully proportioned seascape in the style of Paul Nash, more a Turner-esque splash.