This year marks the centenary of the founding of the London Symphony Orchestra, and the celebrations began with a concert performance of Britten's Peter Grimes. The choice seemed apposite: many consider the LSO to be the UK's finest orchestra and Grimes is probably the most important score in the history of 20th-century British music. The opera is also a key work for Colin Davis, whose Covent Garden performances in the 1970s are the stuff of legend.
In some respects, Davis's interpretation has become more extreme with time, more rooted in the opera's violent metaphysics. At the Barbican, his conducting was electrifying, and throughout you were acutely conscious of how the convulsions of nature reflect the irrationalities and contradictions of the human psyche that compel Grimes to self-destruction and turn a reactionary community into a vigilante mob. Storms reared out of the orchestra. The sea, whose movements dominate the work, was heavy with menace even when its surface was calm. The vast forces of the LSO chorus, meanwhile, gave the work the grandeur of oratorio and the implacability of Greek tragedy.
The performance didn't eclipse memories of Covent Garden, however, because of casting. There were some wonderfully detailed character portraits among the various denizens of the Borough and Anthony Michaels-Moore's Balstrode, wise but conflicted, was exemplary. The central couple, however, proved problematic. Glenn Winslade was a rough, bullying Grimes, though he lacked the all-important sense of a poetic mind trapped in the body and soul of a brute. Janice Watson's Ellen, though beautifully sung, didn't have the requisite authority - you can't quite believe that this is a woman prepared to defy society on Grimes's behalf.
Perhaps Winslade and Watson were hampered by the format: we don't witness Grimes strike Ellen, nor do we see the silent, but all-important figure of Grimes's apprentice. This undermines the dramatic impact of a flawed but thrilling evening.
· Repeat performance tonight. Box office: 0845 120 7550.
