The great promise was there, though. That ’48 Met debut was as Peter Grimes, no less. At the work’s Met premiere, the role had been taken by Frederick Jagel, then concluding his long and protean association with the company. But Sullivan soon took over the part, and sang it in eleven of the thirteen performances the then-new opera notched over two seasons. He came to it almost directly from the Broadway run of Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, whose original cast recording gives a good idea of his roomy lyrical sound and romantic expressive inclinations, especially in one of the score’s best-remembered songs, “Lonely House.” And with him throughout the run of Grimes was another Street Scene cast member, Polyna Stoska, who played Anna Maurrant in the Weill work (she won a Tony) and Ellen Orford in the Britten.
Critics who take the trouble to look in retrospect at the Met’s first effort with Grimes don’t give it much respect. And it’s true that some of the opera’s most characteristic aspects are realized only in outline, at least as transmitted on these two recordings, one from 1948, the second from 1949.(I) I’m inclined to be a bit more charitable. For one thing, both these performances offer the healthiest-sounding collection of voices you will find in the roles we would call secondary but substantial, of which Grimes has many. From the first lines of the Prologue on we hear as Swallow the gong-like bass of Jerome Hines, here in its freshest splendor. He wasn’t then, or ever throughout his long career in nearly every major bass role of the standard repertory, the most subtle or imaginative of interpreters But it’s a pleasurable bit of Shock of the Old to hear how he vocally dominates the music of this important character. In this sequence is also John Garris as Rector Adams—more of a slender “character singer” type of voice, but a good one, clear of tone and word, exact of intonation. By the time we have arrived at the demanding “Grimes is at his exercise” ensemble in Act 2, the full complement is in vigorous play:
Footnotes
| ↑I | I can only speculate on the source of the ’48 performance. It cannot be from that season’s broadcast, for which the title role was given, as was his proper due, to Jagel. What we may have here is Sullivan’s debut, which took place before the broadcast, and I conjure an image of some friend of the tenor’s with a wire recorder concealed under a trench coat. In any event, it has to be from an in-house source that has somehow been preserved. Considering that, the audio quality, though congested and at times distorted, is not at all bad. The ’49 performance is the broadcast of Feb. 12, and in the version available online is identified as an Armed Forces Radio Network transmission. That probably means (and the ongoing surface noise would seem to confirm this) that we’re hearing it via AFRN transcription discs. I have some familiarity with those, since during my time with the psywar battalion at Ft. Bragg, N. C. in the late ’50s, the radio broadcast mobile vans we used for much of our training were generously stocked with such discs, dating back into the 1940s. Group agreement being necessary, we listened mostly to the old Sunday night comedy and variety shows during our down time. But I have often wondered what might yet exist in a military warehouse, or perhaps in private hands via “surplus” purchases. The sound heard here is more present than that of the ’48 recording, but also at times harsh, and with the expectable artifacts of radio transmission, as heard by transcription from an old source. I’m sure some restoration work could make a positive difference. |
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