“Instead, the focus was intimately on Grimes himself. A few years ago Alan Oke gave the festival a memorable portrayal of Gustav von Aschenbach in Britten’s last opera, Death in Venice, and his Peter Grimes was no less intense. As though peering into a pit of despair, Oke portrays a man with black thoughts deep in his heart, and the moments when he was taken to his vocal limits only added to the sense of a soul teetering on the edge.”
Richard Fairman, Financial Times, 9 June 2013
“Some singers invest Grimes with a full-on aggression, but here Alan Oke gave him an arresting inwardness, the goal being less vocal beauty per se than a burning expressivity, and his two great recitatives – his hymn to the stars and his visions of escape from economic bondage – were glowingly illumined… The final scene, with Oke savagely pronouncing his own death-sentence, was haunting in the extreme.”
Michael Church, The Independent, 10 June 2013
“…Alan Oke’s Grimes had a searing intensity…”
Michael Church, The Independent, 18 June 2013
“Alan Oke seems to inhabit whatever role he plays with total assurance and credibility and his portrayal of Grimes is unambiguous: this is not the wronged outsider, a misunderstood dreamer, but an unremarkable-looking man profoundly at odds with himself, capable of terrifyingly violent mood swings.”
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 18 June 2013
“…Alan Oke’s enigmatic Grimes was framed in a halo of freezing mist, half-monster, half-man, his oilskin as black as the night. ”
Anna Picard, The Independent, 22 June 2013
“…marking the dramatic start of Peter Grimes on the beach at Aldeburgh, the most talked about event of the season, not least sartorially. (Hoodies are now de rigueur at the opera.) No one present will forget Alan Oke, a noble and poetic Grimes, standing high amid upturned fishing boats, an outsider against the elements, fighting real, gusty winds to be heard.
The whole enterprise, written about exhaustively elsewhere, was a feat on the part of director Tim Albery, his technical crew and his fearless singers. Each deserves highest praise for a Peter Grimes like no other. While a chill nor’easterly, as Plomer might have put it, whipped around our ears, we too became part of the action.”
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 23 June 2013
“Alan Oke, singing his first Grimes on ‘stage’, still managed to communicate plenty of interpretative and vocal nuance, playing the troubled fisherman as a difficult, abrasive character who was no less sympathetic for his roughness… Oke provided haunting images of determination and isolation as they stood atop the set, buffeted by the wind, to deliver their solos in the final act.”
Hugo Shirley, Opera, August 2013
“Alan Oke in the role is rugged, capped, inscrutable and sings beautifully. His ‘Now the Great Bear and Pleiades’, Britten’s sublime inspiration, is alone worth going to the film for.”
Michael Tanner, The Spectator, 7 September 2013
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