Opera on 3

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Music: Classical: Opera

Programme presenting rare and fascinating operatic performances

Programme presenting rare and fascinating performances and vividly communicating the immediacy of the live experience

Opera on 3: Britten's The Turn of the Screw

Britten's The Turn of the Screw

BBC Radio 3 - Opera on 3, Britten's The Turn of the Screw

Iván Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Britten's The Turn of the Screw.

Iván Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra in The Turn of the Screw, Britten's creepy opera where transgression and evil prevail at a large, isolated country house.

Britten's creepy yet compelling opera, based on Henry James's sinister novella, explores the themes which preoccupied Britten: childhood, loss of innocence, night, transgression and evil. 

A governess arrives at a large country house whose only occupants are the housekeeper Mrs Grose and two orphans, Miles and Flora. Charged by their absent guardian with looking after the children, the Governess becomes aware of two mysterious figures, identified by the housekeeper as the valet, Peter Quint, and the former governess Miss Jessel. Both of them, the housekeeper tells the Governess, are dead. But at night their malign, ghostly manifestations call to the children and the Governess attempts to protect them. Flora is taken to safety by Mrs Grose but as Quint speaks to Miles, he dies in the arms of the Governess.

Perhaps the opera's most famous line, quoted from WB Yeats’s The Second Coming, sums up Britten's disquieting and ambiguous masterpiece: “the ceremony of innocence is drowned”.

Recorded last September at the Béla Bartók National Concert Hall, Budapest and introduced by Kate Molleson.

Benjamin Britten: The Turn of the Screw

Act 1

7.25 pm
Interval
Kate Molleson explores the themes of Britten's The Turn of the Screw with Iván Fischer, and talks to best-selling author Neil Gaiman about our enduring fascination with ghost stories.

7.45 pm
Act 2

Governess ….. Miah Persson (soprano) 
Mrs Grose ….. Laura Aikin (soprano)
Prologue/Peter Quint ….. Andrew Staples (tenor)
Miss Jessel ….. Allison Cook (soprano)
Miles …. Benjamin Fletcher (treble) 
Flora ….. Lucy Barlow (soprano)

Budapest Festival Orchestra
Iván Fischer (conductor)

Read more about the production - https://bit.ly/3XjR7SK

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