Prom 55: Peter Grimes – review

English National Opera's Prom of Britten's Peter Grimes is derived from the company's hugely admired 2009 production, directed by David Alden. Having not seen it, I can't relate the Prom to the original. But this was, without question, an overwhelming performance, sung, acted and played with uncompromising veracity and commitment, and given a few directorial twists by Donna Stirrup, responsible for its transfer to the Albert Hall.

Alden updated the work to the time (1945) of the first performance, though Stirrup brought a few absurdist touches to it by playing with the concert format itself. One chair too few on the platform at the start left Grimes standing alone, while everyone else sat. Thereafter, simple gestures of standing and sitting became metaphors for social interaction and alienation – a clever idea, used throughout with unobtrusive subtlety.

The evening owed its power, though, to Edward Gardner's conducting and Stuart Skelton's Grimes. Skelton combines the heft of Jon Vickers with the refinement of Peter Pears, so we really do believe that this is a man who has the soul of a poetic visionary in the body of a thug. Gardner, on record as saying he believes the work to be "unshackled and dangerous and very un-English", tore into it with breathtaking lyrical ferocity. The playing and choral singing were simply electric.

The cast was more or less the same as in 2009, the major exception being Iain Paterson (in place of Gerald Finley) as Balstrode: war-wounded, bitterly wise, sensationally sung. Amanda Roocroft was the curiously controlling Ellen, unwittingly provoking Grimes's brutality, even as she tried to temper it. Grimes's persecutors, all of them superbly characterised, included Leigh Melrose's slimeball Ned Keene, Rebecca de Pont Davies's androgynous brothel madam Auntie, and Felicity Palmer as the most terrifying Mrs Sedley imaginable.