West Edge Opera Returns to The Turn of the Screw

West Edge Opera opens its season with Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw, and for three of the production's creators it is a second go at a familiar work. General director Mark Streshinsky, music director Jonathan Khuner and the soprano Laura Bohn all worked together on the company's 2013 staging. In separate interviews with Jessica Zimmer for San Francisco Classical Voice, all three stressed that the opera's shadowy, psychologically complex world, taken from Henry James's 1898 novella, is worth another look. Britten's 1954 work, written with the librettist Myfanwy Piper, tells the story of a governess who travels to a remote country estate to care for Flora and Miles, two children who have already been through several rounds of unimaginable loss. She comes to believe the house is haunted by the ghosts of Peter Quint, the former manservant, and Miss Jessel, the children's previous governess. The new production, which opens on August 1 at the Oakland Scottish Rite Temple, is technically more ambitious and more contemporary than the last. Streshinsky says the production designer Yuki Izumihara has created abstract scenery of the house that surrounds the cast, so that the audience feels it is in the middle of the estate, with the ghosts acting live and simultaneously projected on video. The company's current financial stability, he adds, is what makes doing more with the material possible. This time the story is set in the 1950s, the decade in which the opera was written. That period, Khuner says, makes it far more relatable, because Flora and Miles behave more like the schoolchildren we know today, and the company does not have to interpret late nineteenth-century British norms of behaviour or costume. The Governess is the emotional centre of the piece, her feelings shifting from hope to paranoia and from longing to despair until she loses track of what is real and what is imagined. The question she develops, Bohn says, is how she is going to save these children from the ghosts; the opera becomes a hero's journey, even as her character grows paranoid and begins seeing ghosts in the shadows. Britten's atmospheric, tightly constructed score is another reason to return. The singers are accompanied by a thirteen-piece chamber orchestra of winds, strings, harp, piano and a single percussionist, and the music's central feature is a slowly twisting twelve-note theme that recurs throughout. Khuner asks the audience to listen for connections to that theme in every act: it first appears in the prologue, played very slowly, and is then woven into the score almost everywhere. He has revised some of his earlier ideas. In the opening scene, a long bumpy drumbeat suggests the Governess riding in a country carriage toward the estate. Last time they made it sound as though she were suffering intrusive thoughts on the way; this time it sounds only nervous, because she is simply preparing to go. He also wants Britten's dramatic use of the instruments brought forward. A flute may sound like birds in a garden or like a primal shriek; the drums can create a heartbeat or the tremor of anxiety. One of the Governess's arias is effectively a duet with a frenetic cello line, which Bohn likens to Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee. The score is so singular, Khuner says, that later composers and librettists never imitated its style. Britten's musical conception owed much to the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, who explored atonality and twelve-tone theory between 1910 and 1950; even so, his work has an unmistakably English flavour. Khuner has always been struck by how Britten writes for the voice here: in opera the voice is not an instrument, but Britten tries to control what the singer does just enough to capture each scene's mood in close partnership with the orchestra. Unlike some productions, this one keeps the Governess onstage for the entire opera, witnessing all the action even when she is not singing. That makes the show very strenuous, Bohn says, and she has to find creative ways to release the tension her character is holding. One is to stand back mentally and observe herself as she performs, which helps her keep control of her technique. Khuner explains that opera singers cannot let a character's emotions reach their muscles or their voice; they must deliver the lines and the notes with feeling without giving themselves over to it the way an actor might. Bohn says the subject and the role are unsettling. She has played several leading roles where the character is on the verge of madness, so it is not unfamiliar ground, but for this production she has drawn on a good deal of support, and after rehearsals she does a shake-it-off ritual with the children in the cast. Streshinsky says the opera has multiple threads that converge, and that at one point it appears Quint's ghost has come to possess Miles, which is horrifying. The destruction of innocence is a recurring theme in Britten's operas, he notes, and this production pushes that idea very far while leaning much more into the ambiguity of the story, so that audience members are likely to interpret it differently from one another. The children's roles are double cast. James Coniglio and Noah Hajduk of the San Francisco Boys Chorus alternate as Miles, and Siena Coniglio and Roya Agarwal alternate as Flora. All four are very good singers, Streshinsky says, and their memory for lines and notes is amazing. He is proud of how far West Edge Opera has come in thirteen years, and credits the company's donor base for making that stability possible, thanking them and every audience member for their support. Tickets and performance information: westedgeopera.org/turnofthescrew