Excellent thread apple...

I still haven't digested all there is to offer in this thread but I thought I'd better acknowledge the fact that I've been reading it too.

Unlike Sir J, I tended to take exception to the article by Libby whatshername..  I didn't like her morally self-righteous indignation directed toward those who take their relationships with boys beyond the Platonic. Libby sucks lemons.

Gawd.. what a nightmare of abuse.

Abuse by the authorities that is !!!

Thanks for the link..  I'm going to post the link on Dreamscape Forum, it's something everyone should read.

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the turn of the screw.

there's a radio dramatisation this afternoon of the original story - listenable to thereafter via bbc web site.

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flora's played by lulu popplewell - older sister of freddie, boy star of peter pan.

miles is played by joseph tremain.

got his picture via google images from

happykennel.250x.com

go there at own risk.

buggy, pop-up infested site.

maybe even got viruses on it.

at any rate viewing it on this browser was an exceedingly unpleasant experience.

there's a brit novelist called rose tremain; perhaps joseph is related to her.

she's into boys.

here's what she said at book-club interview :

(shouldn't that read "there <b>is</b> now a group..."?!)

<i>...There are now a group of 'mystical boys' in my fiction. Perhaps they are the ghosts of the sons I never had!

But I believe in the idea that, sometimes, children can see or intuit things which the grownups, mired in their domestic reality, fail to see.

I think they can also have a sweet affinity with the natural world and find consolation in talking to small creatures, as Marcus does in Music & Silence.

Perhaps, more importantly, I think that most human beings realise only a fraction of the true potential of their minds, so the spiritual or mystical, the things which remain mysterious or unexplained have always drawn me to include them in any scheme for a novel.

I think I'm saying to the reader: "look and listen. Be silent. Try to apprehend the complexity of the world and what it is to be human in it..."</i>

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dreamscape has a good thread on Benjamin Britten and boys' voices.  Britten is interesting because no other opera composer (excepting possibly Menotti) has written parts for a boy voice.  Miles's haunting "Malo" in Turn of the Screw springs to mind but don't forget the fairies in Midsummer Nights Dream.  They wake Bottom and are very argumentative and disruptive.  This is probably my favourite musical sequence:  the Decca recording captures this brilliantly and the 14 y o who sings/talks Puck is outstanding - if a little too much of a middleclass English home counties 1960s teenager.

up.

I would just like to recommend two opera recordings available on dvd by ArtHaus Musik, that is the Turn of the screw and Death in Venice. In both cases these are the best versions I have heard to this day.


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I also like this recording for Harding's very precise conducting (a bit in the manner of Sir Simon Rattle). Quite different from the way Britten did in his own recording, which pays more attention to the expressiveness of the musical ideas. For instance nobody else has directed the duo between Miles and Flora "Tom Tom, the piper's son " with such a visionary intensity.
Anyway it seems that this opera is still seldom recorded (compared to Fidelio, or the Magic flute) but all versions seem to have their interest.

There is even a fifth recording which comes to my mind, Del Bosque:

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I have not listened to this recording as often as the others, but it seems also quite enjoyable too.