Jonathan Kent’s Glyndebourne on Tour production from last autumn is back in the main summer festival this month, and most welcome it is too. No matter how many times you hear Britten’s adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story, there are new subtleties to uncover in the words set, the actions undertaken and the notes’ glinting metamorphoses. They glint especially with the London Philharmonic’s chamber textures and Edward Gardner’s masterly conducting. He has penetrated right inside this score: he knows every twist of motif and colour and the reasons why.

Kent’s clean production and Paul Brown’s imaginative designs offer other reasons to rejoice. Britten’s musical ingenuity is echoed in the various uses of Brown’s windows. They’re the drawing room. They’re Bly church. They’re the lake, Miss Jessel’s haunting ground. Every other trick, from the revolving stage to the brilliantly simple use of film, enlightens and enhances.

It’s not, of course, a jolly show. More than most, this staging of The Turn of the Screw brings out the work’s darkest corners. When Quint calls out to the boy Miles, caught in his bath, our thoughts inevitably run a certain way. Performances carry their own frisson. Christopher Sladdin, back as Miles with Joanna Songi’s Flora, might not convey David Hemmings’s scent of danger, famous from the 1954 premiere; but he’s frightening enough in his Act II suit, striking little adult postures.

The Governess is more disturbing still, thanks to Camilla Tilling’s thrilling soprano. “Things have been done here that are not good,” she tells Anne-Marie Owens’s bluff housekeeper; but with a voice so heated that her character’s obsessive concern for Miles becomes as much a part of what is “not good” as anything perpetrated by Quint. In the hands of William Burden and Emma Bell, the ghostly intruders insinuate themselves with menacing solidity: these are no figments of the imagination.

Yet the Screw , above all, is an ensemble opera. Kent’s production proves its perfect mirror. Some directors ride in like a superstar, throwing their own party; but everything here fuses and illuminates, from the choice of decade (the circumspect 1950s) to Quint’s nonchalant leaning on Miles’s bed. The only problem is the dinner interval: good for the stomach, bad for sustaining the chilly spell of Britten’s opera masterpiece.

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