BRITTEN The Turn of the Screw (1954)
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)
Miah Persson, Toby Spence, Susan Bickley, Giselle Allen, Joanna Songi, Thomas Parfitt, London Philharmonic Orchestra/Jakub Hrůša
FRA MUSICA FRA007 (111:00 (opera); 22:00 (extras))
Britten’s ghost opera has attracted some remarkable recordings over the years — the composer’s own 1955 account with Peter Pears and Jennifer Vyvyan remains the unavoidable benchmark, that reading carrying the weight of immediate creation, the ink barely dry — but the Glyndebourne production captured here under Jakub Hrůša and directed by Jonathan Kent makes a compelling case for itself on its own entirely different terms.
Kent sets the action in the 1950s, the decade of the opera’s premiere, and the choice is shrewder than it might first appear. He has spoken of the period as representing a last moment of plausible British innocence — which is precisely what the opera proceeds to destroy. The Governess arrives at Bly by train rather than coach, a single image that tells us where we are without editorial comment. Economy of that kind governs the whole production.
The staging turns on two counter-revolving discs — a literalization of the title mechanism that could easily feel too clever but somehow doesn’t — and a massive structure of glass panes that tilts, revolves, rises and falls with an unsettling liquid quality. When it becomes the lake in which Miss Jessel drowned, you feel the cold of it. Glass as boundary, as mirror, as surface that both reveals and distorts: it’s the right visual metaphor for an opera built entirely on ambiguity.
What Kent understands, and what many directors fumble, is that the horror in The Turn of the Screw is most frightening when it remains at the edge of visibility. Quint’s first appearance in the Tower scene is nothing but a shadow spreading across the back wall — and it’s more disturbing than any amount of theatrical machinery could manufacture. Britten knew this too. The whole score operates at the threshold of the sayable; those eerie variations on the twelve-note screw theme create dread not through violence but through inexorability, each turn tightening what cannot be loosened.
The cast is exceptional. Miah Persson’s Governess is genuinely touching — a young woman whose susceptibility to beauty is precisely what makes her vulnerable, and Persson captures that double exposure without sentimentality. Toby Spence brings to Quint a honeyed, seductive quality that makes the character’s corrupting influence entirely believable; his melismatic calls to Miles float with the specific wrongness Britten wrote into them. Susan Bickley’s Mrs. Grose is the production’s emotional anchor, a woman who knows more than she says and says more than she means.
The children are cast with evident care. The scene in Act I where Quint appears silhouetted against the backdrop, singing to Miles before lifting the boy from the bath — Kent pushes the suggestion of sexual predation here further than most directors have risked, and it lands with genuine revulsion. The scene works not because of sensationalism but because of restraint everywhere around it. Context does the work.
Hrůša draws playing from the London Philharmonic that is chamber-precise, lean and tightly coiled. The chamber scoring — thirteen players, the intimacy of it — demands absolute transparency, and he provides it without sacrificing momentum. The screw turns. You hear every thread.
Against Colin Davis’s taut, somewhat cooler Philips album, or the visceral urgency of Richard Hickox’s Chandos version, this one locates itself in the theatrical, the visual, the enacted. That is both its limitation and its strength. As a document of what a great opera house can do with this work — what imagination, resources and serious casting bring to bear — it’s exemplary. Decisively recommended.
