Turn of the Screw

Every year, the young singers in Seattle Opera’s Young Artists Program (YAP) put on their own fully staged opera. This year, the production is Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, based on Henry James’s story by the same name.

The story is fairly creepy: a Governess is hired to look after two children, Flora and Miles, and eventually comes to believe that they are possessed by a nurse and a valet (respectively) who used to work for the family. All right, that’s a lame explanation of the plot, but we’re sure it’s full of beautiful tense moments. Britten and James are, after all, masters of their genres.

Opera has a long tradition of mixing up gender roles. Many roles for mezzo-sopranos are male (Cherubino in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, Oktavian in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier). In early Italian opera, leading male roles were sung by castrati. Since that practice has died out, these roles are now generally sung by mezzo-sopranos or counter-tenors. Depending on the role and the tradition, the choice of whether to cast a man or a woman is often left up to the director.

In this production of The Turn of the Screw, the part of Miles will be played by David Korn, who is a male soprano. There are only a handful of male sopranos singing professionally in this country, and Korn is the first to go through Seattle’s YAP. An interview with him can be found here.

The opera runs March 31st, April 1st, 7th and 8th at 7:30 pm, and April 2nd and 9th at 2:00 pm at the Meydenbauer Center in Bellevue. We recommend you get tickets now, as the shows will sell out. Tickets are $35.