Billy Budd cut down to size

Next summer’s Aix-en-Provence festival presents a version of Britten’s opera redesigned for pinchpenny times:

A mystery of origins and formal uncertainty shroud the story of Billy Budd, both in its operatic version, combining the libretto by E.M. Forster and Eric Crozier and the music by Britten, and in the literary source that inspired it. Indeed, the novella Billy Budd, Sailor by Herman Melville (1819-1891) was not published until 1924, posthumously, without its status as a finished work being assured. Britten and his librettists took it up a quarter of a century later, creating an opera first in four acts (1951) and then in two, a new version first for radio (1960) and then for the stage (1964).

Sixty years on, the musical adaptation by British composer Oliver Leith (born in 1990) concentrates the opera in length and scale. Lasting 1 hour and 40 minutes, The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor requires three keyboards, percussion and six singers. Around the American baritone Ian Rucker (Billy) will be Christopher Sokolowski (Edward Fairfax Vere), Joshua Bloom (John Claggart) and three singers from the Académie 2025’s Voice Residency, performing a variety of roles under the musical direction of Finnegan Downie Dear.