- guardian.co.uk, Friday July 26 2002 14.40 BST
- The Guardian, Friday July 26 2002
Britten: The Turn of the Screw Rodgers/Bostridge/Henschel/ Tierney/Leang/ Wise/Mahler Chamber Orchestra/Harding
(Virgin Classics 2 CDs)
Deborah Warner's production of Britten's greatest chamber opera, first seen at the Barbican, was one of the Royal Opera's few shining good deeds in the naughty world of the Covent Garden closure in the late 1990s. When it was restaged at the beginning of this year in the new house (with an identical cast other than the two children's roles), it seemed as intense and potently ambiguous as ever. This recording, employing the same singers and conductor but substituting members of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra for the principals of the ROH Orchestra, was made at Snape Maltings immediately after that run of performances.
The competition on disc for the newcomer is formidable, especially from Britten's own Decca account, recorded in 1955, with Peter Pears and Jennifer Vyvyan, and the underrated version that Colin Davis conducted on Philips, originally as the soundtrack to a Czech film, with Robert Tear and Helen Donath. But it is a measure of the strengths of the Virgin performance, better recorded than any of its rivals, that it sits alongside them quite comfortably. The whole achievement, in fact, seems as remarkable on disc as it did in the theatre.
It is dominated, naturally, by two singers, Joan Rodgers and Ian Bostridge. Rodgers is arguably the finest Governess of all, projecting an intriguing amalgam of hysteria, common sense and obsessive protectiveness in elegantly chiselled lines and unfailing beauty of tone.
Bostridge's performance as Peter Quint will inevitably be compared with that of Pears, and it does have some similarities, especially in the clarity of diction. But Bostridge's tone is much more varied than that of his famous predecessor, and while he is not as ferally seductive as some Quints, there is enough here to make the character live and to make him truly dominate the scenes in which he appears. The rest of the cast supports these two outstanding performances remarkably. Jane Henschel makes an authentically sinister Mrs Grose, the housekeeper, who is in some ways the most disturbing character in the opera (she surely knows what's going on from the start), and Vivian Tierney is a pathetic, lost Miss Jessel. The children, Julian Leang as Miles and Caroline Wise as Flora, are sharply characterised, while Daniel Harding knits together the strands of the chamber orchestration with great adroitness. The result is much more than a souvenir of a great stage production.
