Super Size Me

While Lucretia was still on tour, Britten left for a brief visit to America - his first transatlantic journey by air - where Peter Grimes was at last to be staged at Koussevitzky's Berkshire Festival at Tanglewood, a vast event involving hundreds of music students, past and present. Three performances were given in early August by a young and enormous cast - enormous in every sense, for Eric Crozier, who had flown over to produce, recalls that in overfed America it was impossible to find a thin child to play the appentice.

The 1946 US premiere of Britten's Peter Grimes recalled in Humphrey Carpenter's book Benjamin Britten, A Biography (Faber ISBN 0571143253). The conductor was the twenty-eight-year-old Leonard Bernstein, his assistant was another musician who has featured here recently, Peter Paul Fuchs.

In 1945 Joan Cross had sung the role of Ellen Orford in the UK premiere of Peter Grimes conducted by Reginald Goodall, read more about Joan Cross here.
In my photo Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s holds a definitely not-overfed Apprentice in Opera North's 2006 production of Peter Grimes. Super Size Me is, of course, the title of Morgan Spurlock's 2004 feature film. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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