2026

From the program:

“I first heard Britten’s Peter Grimes as an undergraduate voice student, in a 2019 concert performance by the SSO, starring Stuart Skelton. His voice, at once startlingly powerful and delicately vulnerable, painted Grimes as a man tortured by his demons, whose struggles manifested as the realisation of his greatest fear: transformation into the very monster he was accused of being. Throughout the opera it also seemed to me that there was something that was not being said. The gossip and viciousness of the borough combined with the softness of Grimes ’ inner life echoed, to my ears, stories of gay men who had been pushed to their breaking point by communities whose fears turned to cruelty and violence. Through my studies I came to know of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears ’ lifetime of love and music, and what began as a possibly tenuous queer reading of a single opera emerged to me as a pattern in their collaborations. Encoded implicitly within their work was something of the emotional, if not the literal, truth of the two men ’ s lives together in a society that, at best, preferred not to know about their true natures. It was from this place that the work for Britten ’ s Tenor began, and continues to develop with the heartfelt and creative exploration of some exceptional colleagues and co-creators. Pears wrote to Britten in 1970, “I am here as your mouthpiece and I live in your music - and I can never be thankful enough to you and to Fate for all the heavenly joy we have had together for 35 years. ” As Chopin had the piano and Paganini the violin, Britten had the tenor - his tenor.”


- Elias Wilson

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