|
|
Article: Adonis meets Tom Cruise in the Garden
- Article from:
- The Independent (London, England)
- Article date:
- June 4, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 1995 The Independent - London. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
|
BENJAMIN BRITTEN'S Billy Budd is a piece with nothing to prove.
Peter Grimes may be the most "important" of his operas, Turn of
the Screw the most perfect, Death in Venice the most alluring; but
the combination of controlled Verdian grandeur with near-Debussyan
atmospheric finesse that you find in Budd gives it the edge. And to
be the greatest Britten opera is, almost unarguably, to be the
greatest opera in the English language. But there is still
unfinished business about Billy Budd that needs to be addressed in
performance: the uneasy relationship between the opera's Christian
imagery and its homo-erotic subtext, and the question of whether it
should play in four acts (as originally ...