During the celebrations of the centenary of his birth in 2013 the
music of Benjamin Britten was given a thoroughgoing exploration throughout
the opera houses and concert venues of the world. This extended not only
through all the works published during the composer’s lifetime but
also into the realm of the vast amount of manuscript material from his
earlier years which had previously remained in Britten’s bottom
drawer. This plethora of performances inevitably led to a vast expansion in
his representation on disc, quite apart from the reissue of the many
recordings the composer made during his long career as a performing artist.
The present release of a concert performance of
The turn of the
screw brings the total number of individual representations of the work
in the current catalogue to eleven, exceeded among Britten’s operas
only by the number of complete recordings of
Peter Grimes. During
Britten’s lifetime there was only one recording of
The turn of the
screw available, that made in mono by Britten himself immediately
following on the 1955 world première of the opera in Venice with the
original cast. That recording that remains available to this day. Only in
1982, over twenty-five years later, did a second appear, the first in
stereo, conducted by Sir Colin Davis. The remaining nine have been entirely
the product of the last thirty years.
It is perhaps not surprising that
The turn of the screw has
achieved such popularity. The ghost story of Henry James is full of
fascinating subtleties that inevitably attract the interest of stage
directors and producers. How many of the supernatural elements are real, and
how many are simply the product of the Governess’s over-ferbrile
imagination? James himself left these ambiguities to stand, but Britten and
his librettist Myfanwy Piper gave more substance to the eerie events. This
was even to the extent of allowing the two ghosts a scene entirely to
themselves which serves to establish at the very least their corporeal
substance. Of the eleven recordings in the catalogue, no fewer than six are
video productions which explore these issues in greater detail. One of the
post-Davis audio recordings forms part of the studio series of Britten
operas conducted originally for Collins Classics by Steuart Bedford. The
remainder - including this one - derive from opera and concert performances.
The original Decca recording was perhaps oddly made in mono only,
although the company were experimenting with stereo at the time. It remains
one of the best of all mono recordings, with plenty of atmosphere around the
sound and a beautifully judged sense of distance when Pears enters with his
melismatic calls of “Miles!”. Oddly enough this new recording,
made in the unresonant acoustic of the Barbican Hall, does not improve
greatly on the sound that the engineers managed to capture in 1955 even with
the advantages of SACD and multi-channel production. The voices are observed
from a near distance, but the diction is far less clear than Britten managed
to obtain from his original cast. Even Andrew Kennedy in the
piano-accompanied Prologue lacks the pinpoint clarity of delivery that Peter
Pears gave us. Sally Matthews has a richer tone than Jennifer Vyvyan, but
again this comes at the expense of the words. Catherine Wyn-Rogers has more
voice than Joan Cross in 1955 - the latter was coming to the end of her
career at the time - and blends beautifully with Matthews, but again one is
at a loss to know precisely what she is singing about without the benefit of
the text provided with the discs. The narrative of Quint’s death
(track 11) does not generate the dramatic
frisson which we really
need at this point. Matthews’ delivery of the horrified exclamation
“Died?” sounds just too matter-of-fact, not a patch on
Vyvyan’s shocked reaction.
Unfortunately this lack of dramatic involvement, perhaps an
inevitable concomitant of a concert performance which has not been preceded
by a staged presentation, extends to the singing of Michael Clayton-Jolly in
the pivotal role of Miles. His delivery of “Malo, malo” is
precisely placed and plaintively delivered, but David Hemmings’ close
identification with the part in the original recording - and more
sympathetic microphone placement - enabled him to bring so much more to what
should be a chilling moment. Microphone placement is again a problem when
Peter Quint’s voice is heard from offstage at the beginning of track
17. Here Kennedy’s voice is initially so far distanced as to be almost
indistinguishable beneath the accompanying celesta figuration. You can
actually hear him coming onto the Barbican stage during the passage that
follows, which unfortunately sheds the supernatural atmosphere that should
surround his voice. On the other hand Katherine Broderick’s Miss
Jessel is distinctly present from her very first words - not at all spooky.
When the Governess and Mrs Grose interrupt, their voices sound very much in
the same dimension as the ghosts. Miles’s concluding remark “I
am bad, aren’t I?” sounds rather plain and lacks the disturbing
sense of corrupted innocence that Hemmings brought to the words.
In the Second Act very much the same considerations apply. The scene
in the churchyard with the virtuoso part for tubular bells again lacks
definition in the text, with Clayton-Jolly placed rather far back from the
microphones in the recorded balance. The Governess’s realisation
“It was a challenge!” is beautifully sung but without any sense
of dawning despair - or madness. Lucy Hall blends well with Clayton-Jolly in
their many passages of duet. However, the scene between the Governess and
Miles in his bedroom - the scoring of the music disturbingly carrying a
sense of the bedroom scene in
The rape of Lucretia - where the
preternatural maturity of the corrupted Miles in his address to the
Governess as “My dear” should freeze the perceptions - is again
lacking is the sense of sheer menace that we should experience here. Even
his final shout of “Peter Quint, you devil!” which should sound
like the eruption of a mind driven to the limits of endurance, is just that
- a shout. Matthews sings her final lament very beautifully and with
considerable feeling but Robert Tear once recorded that Britten verbally
assaulted him for treating the composer’s music as a purely musical
exercise rather than a dramatic one. One rather fears that his reaction here
would have been similar.
The orchestral performance under Richard Farnes is everything it
should be, and indeed as a representation of this chilling score this is a
very good performance indeed. That said, it does lack the sheer sense of
discovery and horrified engagement that was present in the original Decca
recording. Even as a modern representation of the score listeners may
prefer, for example, Colin Davis’s richer sound. One gets the distinct
impression that the work may just have become a bit
too familiar and
comfortable to the cast. There is really something to be said for
seeing the opera on DVD or Blu-Ray, where the nature of the
relationships between the characters can be more readily appreciated. There
are, after all, six to choose from.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
Britten discography & review index:
The turn of the screw
