SF Opera brings fresh, fascinating and polished ‘Turn of the Screw’ to Lincoln Theater

By JAMES KEOLKER
Register Music Critic

San Francisco Opera made its annual appearance at Lincoln Theater Sunday afternoon resulting once again in a production highly polished, musically professional and vocally engrossing.

The cast of young singers from the Adler Fellows training program presented Benjamin Britten’s “The Turn of the Screw,” an enigmatic opera based upon the Henry James thriller, and they could not have been better.

Foremost was soprano Melody Moore in the challenging role of the Governess, a character who must equivocate between terror and madness, and Moore was riveting in her portrayal, not once leaving the stage. This young singer poured forth effortless tones of gold as well as soft, soaring silver, and her acting was incisive and communicative.

She was well matched by Matthew O’Neill as the vengeful ghost, Peter Quint. The tenor sang every word with a haunting, other-world quality, half-demon, half-madman. He also sang the mysterious Prologue, who begins the opera by reading from the Governess’ diary. This diary is an important element in the unraveling of the opera’s plot, for the entirety of the story is told through the perception of the Governess and her writings. And thus it is at several critical points the audience must decide where the truth might be, with the possibly psychotic Governess or the disquieting ghosts.

O’Neill was joined by soprano Ji Young Yang as the ghost of the former Governess, Miss Jessell, and she too sang with an airy, supernatural quality. Yang added to her portrayal with wonderful spectral movements.

The focus of the opera, however, is the two young children who are either completely innocent or completely complicit in their Governess’s undoing. Seventh-grader Nick Kempen was fascinating as the young Miles, a boy either scheming, possessed or perhaps abused by his elders. And his collapse and death in the arms of the Governess at the opera’s end sent a shiver through the audience.

He was joined by sixth-grader Kelty Morash as his younger sister, Flora, an equally enigmatic role sung with juvenile mastery and style.

But one of the most impressive voices of the cast was in the smallest role, that of the watchful housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. Heidi Melton sang with unstinting power and assurance. Here is a young singer who bears watching, as she may well have a future in the operas of Richard Strauss and Wagner.

Britten’s intense, edgy score is wrought from one basic theme with a number of innovative variations, each of the opera’s 14 scenes bridged by an evocative interlude. Conductor Mark Morash brought forth a continuous sheen and shimmer from his 13 musicians chosen from the Napa Valley Symphony. Maestro Morash is an excellent conductor, with youth and vitality and careful attention to sonic detail, and he slowly, carefully built the opera to its dramatic climaxes.

The eerie interiors of a remote British mansion, with its tower and lake and garden, were designed by Eric Flatmo, and the atmospheric lighting was by Mark Gilmore, each scene given a distinctive sculpted quality.

The production was under the skillful guidance of Sheri Greenawald, the director of the San Francisco Opera Center, which includes the Adler Fellows program.

Once again those of us who cherish opera as an art were indebted to these young talents as well as Lincoln Theater, its underwriters and sponsors, and Michael Savage, its executive director, for continuing to bring us these fresh, energizing productions.

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