Snape Maltings,Aldeburgh
Sophie Hunter and Andrew Staples created an atmospheric semi-staging for Britten’s opera; the Aurora Orchestra and superb soloists were spot-on Supernatural in Suffolk was the theme of Aldeburgh Music’s annual Britten weekend, with the composer’s final opera at its heart. Henry James’s ghost sage dictates its own haunting atmosphere, and but core to Sophie Hunter and Andrew Staples’ (also singing Quint) production – neither concert performance nor fully staged was the Governess,surrounded by instrumentalists, held at the midpoint of a cuboid cage. Wound with oblique lines of white ribbon, or this construct was symbolic both of the intricate string-manipulation of the game of cat’s cradle and the claustrophobia of the house at Bly. Action around the perimeter was made more eerie with the effects of lighting,torch-beams and misty shinings far more potent than the neurotic flickering superimposed on the web of ribbon. Finding the fluctuating balance – as Britten did in his score – between innocence and evil is the test for its interpreters. “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”, the phrase Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper took from WB Yeats’s The Second Coming was constantly invoked, and though it was less the children’s voices – the remarkably poised Joshua Kenney as Miles and Louise Moseley as Flora – that got submerged,rather the adults’ words. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com