Albert Herring is one of Benjamin Britten’s more fortunate “outsider” protagonists: he emerges not only alive, but appreciably happier, from an opera whose dissection of class conflict and small-mindedness comes in much fizzier form than Peter Grimes or Billy Budd. Crowned Loxford’s “May King” in the absence of any local girl sufficiently chaste to be Queen, unworldly Albert’s modest descent from virtue into vice – a night on the tiles precipitated by some spiked lemonade – provokes outrage from the pillars of his community; but for the young man himself, and the postwar generation he represents, that hazily remembered pub crawl heralds a new sense of self-possession.
Scored for chamber orchestra, the opera is nevertheless one of Britten’s most musically extravagant, brimming with pastiche and stylistic flourishes, and Eric Crozier’s libretto, which transports a Maupassant short story from Normandy to Suffolk, is a similarly dense, colourful affair. Giles Havergal’s production, revived by Elaine Tyler-Hall, wisely resists further embellishment. Staged in the round in the bijou Howard Assembly Room, with characteristically slick designs by Leslie Travers – plastic grass and fruit crates serving as parlour, shop, and street – it succeeds instead by drawing its audience irresistibly close, for an intimate view of village politics in all their cacophonous glory.
