Santa Fe Opera 2025 Season Review

The Wall Street Journal | By Heidi Waleson

The season’s best show was “The Turn of the Screw,” highlighted by Gemma New’s incisive conducting of Britten’s eerie chamber orchestration, its spareness intensifying the opera’s atmosphere of ever-increasing dread. (It has, alas, the shortest run, with the last of its four performances on Aug. 5.) With her rich soprano, Jacquelyn Stucker captured the frightened, resolute Governess; tenor Brenton Ryan’shigh-class English accent and insinuating melismas made the ghost Peter Quint the embodiment of evil; Jennifer Johnson Cano’s staunch but clueless Mrs. Grose added to the Governess’s isolation.

There’s no ambiguity in Louisa Muller’s staging. The ghosts are present; the only question is whether they or the Governess will prevail in the struggle for the children—Flora (Annie Blitz) and Miles (Everett Baumgarten). Designer Christopher Oramcreated tall windows and distressed walls for Bly, the country house. All the locations—including the lake out of which the other ghost, Miss Jessel (Wendy Bryn Harmer), materializes—are inside. This added to the work’s claustrophobia, as did the black Victorian dresses of the three adult women and Malcolm Rippeth’s creepy lighting. Ms. Muller’s directing flowed through the scenes and orchestral interludes, constructing a seamless, terrifying arc from the Governess’s anxious journey to Bly to her final wail over the dead Miles and her walk into the lake, the last victim of Peter Quint.

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