4 Sea Interludes

A sensational hit when it premiered at London’s Sadler’s Wells Theatre in 1945, Benjamin Britten’s first full-scale opera, Peter Grimes, was shortly taken up by opera houses around Europe and the US, with four of its vivid interludes arranged for concert performance. “Dawn” starts with keening high strings evoking the sky above, a clarinet arabesque swooping downwards before heavy brass conjure the slow heave of a wave. This pattern repeats, with variations, until we reach a great crash, after which the music peters out. “Sunday Morning” suggests a bright day, the glittering waves complementing church bells heard at the interlude’s end. In “Moonlight”, the sea is relatively calm, with just a gentle swell in the strings to suggest its incipient power. This all breaks with fury in the final “Storm”, one with which the anti-hero, Grimes, feels a strange empathy. At the calm centre of that interlude, a yearning string theme echoes his earlier question: “What harbour shelters peace?”