One last show: Bury Court Opera's final performance ever presented Britten's The Turn of the Screw in a production vividly conceived to highlight the venue's distinctive qualities

Britten: The Turn of the Screw - Andrew Dickinson, Hugh Hetherington - Bury Court Opera (Photo Robert Workman)

Britten The Turn of the Screw; Alison Rose, Andrew Dickinson, Daisy Brown, Emily Gray, Jennifer Clark, Harry Hetherington, dir: Ella Marchment, Chroma Ensemble, cond: Paul Wingfield; Bury Court Opera  
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 5 February 2019 
Star rating: 4.5 (★★★★½)
A vividly theatrical and cohesively conceived account of Britten's chamber opera, with compelling performances from the young cast

Last night (16 March 2019) was the last ever performance of Bury Court Opera, the final performance of a new production of Britten's The Turn of the Screw, the company's second production of a season which started with the premiere of Noah Mosley's Aurora [see my review].

Hugh Hetherington, Alison Rose
Bury Court Opera (Photo Robert Workman)

Britten's The Turn of the Screw was directed by Ella Marchment and designed by Holly Pigott, with Alison Rose as the Governess, Andrew Dickinson as Peter Quint and the Prologue, Daisy Brown as Miss Jessel, Emily Gray as Mrs Grose, Jennifer Clark as Flora and Harry Hetherington as Miles. Paul Wingfield conducted the Chroma Ensemble.

Britten's opera might be quite a compact piece, using just six singers and 13 instrumentalists, but its scenic demands are quite complex as Myfanwy Piper's scenario moves in an almost filmic way between locations in and around Bly, and this movement is important to the plot. The opera is hardly one which responds to being played in a single location, and Holly Pigott's imaginative setting for Ella Marchment's production gave us everything the opera needed despite the limited facilities of the Bury Court Opera stage (for the rest of the year the venue is a barn used for weddings).

The big advantage was the dark, claustrophobic nature of the essential space, and by using the stepped stage, and various traps we had a series of evocative settings, emphasised by Ben Pickersgill's dramatic lighting, all darkness and light, full of hidden corners and wonderfully theatrical. Central to Marchment's concept for the production was the area in the upper rear stage, separated from the rest by a translucent black curtain which formed the ghosts' domain, a parallel Bly. Marchment and Pigott set the opera in the correct period, and in the programme book Marchment argued cohesively that the complex psychology of the drama only really works in the Victorian setting with its restriction and propriety.

Contemporary yet romantic: Noah Mosley's Aurora debuts at Bury Court Opera's swansong season

Noah Mosley: Aurora - Isolde Roxby (Aurora), Magid El-Bushra (Prince) - Bury Court Opera (Photo Robert Workman)

Noah Mosley Aurora; Isolde Roxby, Dominic Bowe, Andrew Tipple, Katherine Aitken, Jean-Max Lattemann, Magid El-Bushra, dir: Aylin Bozok, cond: Noah Mosley; Bury Court Opera Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 5 February 2019 Star rating: 3.5 (★★★½)
Confident romanticism & lyricism in a new opera hampered by a poor libretto

Katherine Aitken, Isolde Roxby
Bury Court Opera (Photo Robert Workman)

This year, alas, is the final season of Bury Court Opera, the opera festival which takes place in a delightful barn near Farnham which is used as a wedding venue for the rest of the year. And the festival is certainly going out with a bang. The first of the two operas they are presenting is a new commission from Noah Mosley, with Britten's Turn of the Screw next month.

We caught the second performance of Noah Mosley's Aurora on Saturday 23 February 2019 at Bury Court Opera, in a production directed by Aylin Bozok and designed by Holly Pigott. Noah Mosley conducted, with Isolde Roxby as Aurora, Dominic Bowe as the Exiled Prince, Katherine Aitken as the Wild Woman, Andrew Tipple as the King, Jean-Max Lattemann as the Mountain Witch and Magid El-Bushra as the Prince and the Owl.

In any new opera, the libretto is of prime importance and striking the right balance is difficult. The situation and the plot must appeal to the composer, and the text needs to leave enough space for the music. The libretto of Aurora, by Elisabetta Campeti, is based on an Italian folk tale. Like many such tales, the plot is varied and discursive, which has the advantage of giving plenty of strong and distinctive dramatic situations along with a strong moral. So in Aurora we have a haughty princess dying of a mysterious disease, a wild woman who heals her with a powerful spell, and the princess continuing to use the spell after she is healed, leading to the inevitable punishment from the mountain witch, the princess's gradual coming to self-knowledge, leading to her rescue. Campeti, has however, kept a lot of the twists and turns which, interesting in a story, threaten the drama with loss of focus.

An interesting exercise is to compare the way Henry Newbolt's libretto for Stanford's The Travelling Companion, recently revived by New Sussex Opera [see my review] stripped away a lot of the incidental detail from Hans Christian Anderson's story to create a focused drama. Campeti's libretto lacked this focus, and the essential point of the drama seemed to be in danger of being lost in the imaginative detail. I have to confess that I also found Campeti's style of writing too wordy, and wanted less here also; the characters' tendency to state who they were became rather wearisome, and some of the essential mechanics of the plot were a bit unclear.