The Turn of the Screw, English National Opera, 16 October 2024

Coliseum

Images: © Manuel Harlan
Peter Quint (Robert Murray), Flora (Victoria Nekhaenko),
Miles (Jerry Louth), The Governess (Ailish Tynan)

Governess – Ailish Tynan
Flora – Victoria Nekhaenko
Mrs Grose – Gweneth Ann Rand
Miles – Jerry Louth
Miss Jessel – Eleanor Dennis
Peter Quint – Robert Murray
Prologue – Alan Oke

Director, designs – Isabella Bywater
Lighting – Paul Anderson
Projections – Jon Driscoll

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Duncan Ward (conductor)

It had been a while since I last saw The Turn of the Screw, though there was a time when it seemed quite a regular . To my mind the strongest of Britten’s operas, it was last seen at the Coliseum in an excellent staging by David McVicar: again to my mind, one of his strongest. It now returns in a new ENO production by Isabella Bywater, also designed by her, with an impressive cast conducted by Duncan Ward. 

Flora, Miles, Mrs Grose (Gweneth Ann Rand), Governess

Bywater’s production seems generally to have been well received. Whilst acknowledging her effort to bring a new standpoint to the work, I am not convinced it succeeds; at least, it did not succeed so well for me as it apparently has for many. The drama is presented in the Governess’s flashbacks from a psychiatric hospital, events at Bly presumably at least having contributed to her committal. Scenic projections onto the hospital set lead us back to the house and its grounds: to my eyes, a little clumsily. This was clearly a traumatic, horrific experience for the Governess, all the more so as presented in a finely observed, deeply compassionate performance from Ailish Tynan. There is splendidly creepy – and chillingly meaningful – children’s play, for instance with Flora and her doll.

The problem – and I am not sure this was Bywater’s intention – is that in giving the impression the events may straightforwardly have been imagined by the Governess, the drama veers in a one-sided direction that has one ultimately question what the point of it might be. Asking ‘did the Governess see the ghosts’ is of course a reasonable and indeed necessary question; proceeding as Bywater does in her programme note and also, so it seems, onstage, to ask ‘Did she have a personality disorder?’ risks missing the point. ‘Ambiguity is what makes it unsettling,’ Bywater adds. Precisely, which is why it seems an odd move to rid it of most of that ambiguity; more disturbingly, it comes close to turning the Governess’s distress into a spectacle, and eclipsing the ‘real’ question of what has been done to the children. Having the Governess imagine so much seems both implausible and undesirable. It is perfectly possible, of course, to adopt a partial standpoint; many stagings of all manner of works do, with greater and lesser success. The Turn of the Screw, however, emerges somewhat shortchanged—whilst at the same time, to be fair, far from fruitlessly interrogated. 

Tynan’s performance was absolutely central to those fruits, both detailed and skilfully sketching the broader picture. Eleanor Dennis’s Miss Jessel and Robert Murray’s Peter Quint were similarly detailed portrayals, highly commendable, though the underlying premise perhaps worked all the more against them. Gweneth Ann Rand’s Mrs Grose, by turn warm and distanced, was permitted to offer greater ambiguity. Victoria Nekhaenko’s Flora and Jerry Louth’s Miles were both excellent too, walking dramatic tightropes with great skill and credibility, the latter’s icy delivery in particular both bringing home and into question the theme of innocence’s loss in work and staging. Alan Oke’s Prologue as medical consultant offered a masterclass in diction and framing, surtitles in fact proving unnecessary throughout.

Prologue (Alan Oke)

Ward’s musical interpretation seemed to have been formulated with Bywater’s concept in mind. Especially in the first act, a looser, more rhapsodic approach, suggestive of psychological disorder and even a shift from ghost story into outright horror, was prevalent. What I missed was a stronger sense of line, of the workings of scenic and longer-term construction, so crucial to this opera’s dramaturgy. Perhaps by design, this fell into clearer focus after the interval, suggesting a conflict between freedom and determinism far from irrelevant to the musical as well as stage action. Moments of horror registered in vividly pictorial fashion, at times presaging the desiccated late world of Death in Venice; their integration in this, perhaps Britten’s most constructivist score, was less clear.

Ultimately, then, Bywater’s production did not for me cohere as well as McVicar’s more straightforward yet deeply committed production or Anneliese McKimmon’s thoughtful, more properly ambiguous staging for Opera Holland Park in 2014. Likewise, the conducting of Charles Mackerras and Steuart Bedford on those occasions did more to enable and elucidate Britten’s turning of the musical screw. I was grateful nonetheless for the opportunity to have experienced it, not least for Tynan’s gripping Governess.

Miss Jessel (Eleanor Dennis), Peter Quint, Governess

Festival d’Aix-en-Provence (2) – Orchestre de Paris/Ward - Stravinsky, Schubert, and Beethoven, 12 July 2017

Grand Théâtre de Provence

Stravinsky: Suite no.1 for small orchestra

Schubert: Symphony no.3 in D major, D 200

Stravinsky: Suite no.2 for small orchestra

Beethoven: Symphony no.4 in B-flat major, op.60

Orchestre de Paris

Duncan Ward (conductor)

This year’s Aix Festival has a ‘Stravinsky cycle’ of concerts to accompany its excellent Rake’s Progress. I am delighted to report that the two small Suites for small orchestra received splendid performances. Alas, the problem lay with the remaining ninety per cent of the programme; would that we had had more – much more – Stravinsky instead.

Perhaps not entirely unlike some of Schoenberg’s later tonal works, these little Stravinsky Suites offer an excellent introduction to Stravinsky’s processes without the ‘difficulties’ some may find in some of his music. Such was emphatically the case here; bite-sized the pieces may be, but they emerged as echt Stravinsky. The Orchestre de Paris imparted a pleasingly ‘French’ sound, suggesting kinship with Ravel, that was anything but inappropriate, although the particular colours were entirely Stravinsky’s own. In the ‘Española’ of the First Suite – and certainly not only there – rhythms proved tight and generative, even menacing. The Soldier’s Tale came to mind, but so, inevitably, did Petrushka, especially in the Second Suite. Stravinsky here sounded truly in puppeteer mode – although is he not always, in one sense or another? My only real cavil was Duncan Ward’s extreme holding back in the ‘Valse’. Parody is fine, up to a point, but that seemed too much for the material and its context. Otherwise, these were sparkling, colourful, delightful performances.

Schubert’s Third Symphony started promisingly. The introduction to the first movement sounded properly generative, very much in the line of Haydn, albeit with an intriguing, almost Mendelssohnian lightness to the sound. (It is not how I immediately think of Schubert, but it is surely a good thing to be challenged.) Alas, the rest of the first movement was hard-driven: more Rossini than Beethoven (or Schubert!) It was beautifully played by the Orchestre de Paris: actually one of the best performances I have heard from them, in purely orchestral terms. Moreover, there was nothing unduly distracting. Nevertheless, the formal dynamism that makes sonata form a form rather than a mould or even a mere structure was absent, save, perplexingly, for a darkly serious development section. It is a common problem in much of today’s symphonic conducting, yet no less grievous for that. (Memories of Daniel Barenboim’s outstanding recent Berlin performance will die hard.) Structure and form are not the same things; at least, they should not be.  There was winning intimacy to be heard from the Paris players in the Allegretto, but it emerged as an unduly sectional movement, whatever its very real incidental charms. The Minuet gained from being taken straightforwardly, but the Trio never settled; likewise a charming enough finale. What was truly missing, here and throughout, was a sense of harmonic rhythm, of much of the music being founded upon the bass line, curiously underplayed. Schubert’s music is not merely a string of melodies; nor is any music that is worth performing from the Austro-German tradition in which it stands.

Beethoven’s is certainly not, but yet again that was how it sounded. Ward’s direction of the Fourth Symphony was, for the most part, mercifully free of the perversities that characterise, say, the Beethoven of his mentor, Simon Rattle – so much so as to make it frankly unlistenable. That excellent omission, however, was alas pretty much the only positive aspect to the performance here: again, very well played, on its own terms, but quite uncomprehending of how Beethoven’s music works, let alone of what it might mean. The first movement, from the Introduction onwards, was taken very fast: nothing in principle wrong with that, but it never yielded, never breathed, and never actually spoke of, let alone in, sonata form and its processes. Ironically, there was more than a hint, both here and in the Schubert, of sub-Stravinskian parody. The slow – not at all slow – movement flowed by pleasantly enough; yet again, however, it seemed at best observed rather than lived, its existence entirely on the surface. Prolonged, extreme pianissimi were presumably intended to create tension; they ended up merely sounding weird. As the movement progressed, or regressed, it sounded more and more disconnected. This, at least, seemed very much in the line of Rattle’s Beethoven; the scherzo and finale behaved similarly, albeit in less pulled-around fashion. Ultimately, it was just all rather dull; I was never moved, never even interested. There were incidental orchestral ‘beauties’, but surely that is not what Beethoven is about? If it is, then God help us all. A pity we could not have heard, say, Petrushka instead.