Music: Britten in Venice

Venice’s International Festival of Contemporary Music, which used to play host to such startling modern operas as Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress and Dmitry Shostakovich’s The Lady Macbeth of Mzensk, last week unveiled a collaboration between two chilly and notably elegant talents: Britain’s Composer Benjamin Britten and America’s late, great Author Henry James. The work: Britten’s opera version of The Turn of the Screw.

Venice’s handsome La Fenice theater was festively decked with roses as the full-dress crowd drifted in from gondolas. On hand in person to conduct the world premiere, wearing a white suit and red tie, was Composer Britten, 40. On a stark stage, British Tenor Peter Pears sang the prologue (“It is a curious story. I have it written in faded ink . . .”). From then on. the plot followed the outlines of the Henry James chiller about a young governess in an English country house who attempts to protect her young charges from the evil doings of a pair of phantoms. The opera’s 16 scenes flashed quickly across the stage., building awareness of horror as the red-haired Quint appeared in the tower, the green-face Miss Jessel was seen by the lake, and the ghosts chanted diabolically to the children at night.

The singing alternated between hummable melodies and tricky modernities. Outstanding performer: twelve-year-old David Hemmings, who won cheers in what is probably the longest role ever written for a boy soprano. The score as a whole (written for a small, 13-piece orchestra) skillfully skirted the fringes of the action, ranging from moments of movie-score drama to Peter and the Wolf simplicity, including a lilting harp passage to accompany the children and wailing sirens for the ghosts.

The Italians seemed fairly baffled by the refined music and the obscure Jamesian plot, made no clearer by the strange language (the libretto, by Welsh-English Writer Myfanwy Piper, was sung in English). But the audience politely brought the fine English cast back for eight curtain calls. Wrotem Il Tempo of Britten’s score: “A type of anthology of modern musical taste.” Corriere della Sera applauded Britten’s “sinister castle of sounds,” but found it “difficult to establish even approximately what the new opera is meant to signify.”