Gramophone Magazine
December 2021
DVD of the Month

Robert Murray (Quint), Rhian Lois (The Governess), Leo Jemison (Miles), Alys Mereld Roberts (Flora), Gweneth Ann Rand (Mrs Grose), Francesca Chiejina (Miss Jessel), Sinfonia of London, John Wilson

Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw has become notorious as at once the most stylish and elusively ambiguous of all nineteenth-century ghost stories. In June 1932, the eighteen-year-old Benjamin Britten heard a radio adaptation of James’s story and noted in his diary that it was ‘wonderful, impressive but terribly eerie & scary’. He read the novella for himself in January the following year, telling his diary that he still found it ‘glorious & eerie’ and judging it to be an ‘incredible masterpiece’. His subsequent operatic setting is unequivocally a masterpiece, and is here seen in a first-class production made for television with an outstanding cast led by Robert Murray and Rhian Lois, accompanied by Sinfonia of London, and conducted by John Wilson. Originally planned as a run of live performances, subsequently cancelled because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the production was quickly transformed into a film for television with spectacular results.

"Robert Murray is as immaculate of diction in the Prologue as he is seductively lyrical as the ghostly Quint. Rhian Lois’s every inflection and gesture projects the Governess’s barely controlled hysteria...Wilson conducts 13 members of his Sinfonia of London with needlesharp definition in tempos close to Britten’s own classic 1955 recording, and the Chandos recording enhances this haunting opera’s eerie fragility of sound." - BBC Music Magazine, January 2022.