Burden is a fine singer and actor who does not project force of personality. But here tenor William Burden’s voice is neither heroic nor is it cerebral. Like Peter Grimes and Aschenbach ( Death in Venice) the Indomitable’s Captain Vere is a tenor. He looks us straight in the face to tell us that he could have saved Billy Budd but did not. He continues pondering the enigma as he has since the moment Billy Budd was hung. At the end of the opera the Indomitable’s captain, the now old Starry Vere, the Indomitable’s moral conscience, stands alone on the stage. These 80 inhabitants of the Indomitable populate its globe-shaped world from which no one will escape, not even Billy Budd who, in death, remains alive as the embodiment of a critical enigma of our existence - can good and beauty actually exist in this world? The Grandage production implies that no, it cannot.

It is the world of 40 male San Francisco Opera choristers impressed into service as its crew, along with 15 or so more sailers who have names, plus the ship’s captain and his officers and a number of Ship’s Boys. The set is the exaggerated super structure of a British man-of-war called the Indomitable. This was the 2010 production from Glyndebourne by British theater director Michael Grandage and his designer Christopher Oram, seen at the Brooklyn Academy in 2014 to great acclaim. The diction of the opera’s protagonists was crystal clear, every word was fully understandable in the hyper British-like sounds of careful musical diction. But for this Billy Budd the San Francisco Opera Orchestra somehow clearly projected the beauty of Britten’s moral ideal of handsomeness in a stunning display of colors and volumes and textures.

The War Memorial Opera House was built before architectural acoustics was a science.

Britten’s score in this conductor’s hands proves that Billy Budd’s story is not at all as simple as it seems and that its lesson is so bleak and huge that it demands the protection of high art to be borne. His orchestra was an aggressive, present player in the telling of Melville’s parable. Dutch conductor Lawrence Renes’ seascapes were deeply and powerfully drawn, his battle was monumental, his moral confusion was terrifying, his defeat was shattering.

Houston grand opera billy budd