Turn Of The Screw, Op. 54

Henry James’s novella has become notorious as at once the most stylish and elusively ambiguous of all nineteenth-century ghost stories. In June 1932, the eighteen-year-old Benjamin Britten heard a radio adaptation of James’s story and noted in his diary that it was ‘wonderful, impressive but terribly eerie & scary’. His subsequent operatic setting is unequivocally a masterpiece, and here receives a first-class production made for television with an outstanding cast. (Chandos)