A decade ago, conductor Lorin Maazel and his wife started the Châteauville Foundation, based at Castleton Farms in Rappahannock County, Virginia. On Monday night, rather than have Washingtonians go down to the Shenandoah Mountains, Maazel brought his young musicians to the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater. A cast of talented singers and a finely honed small ensemble of instrumentalists gave an exquisite performance of Benjamin Britten’s chilling and yet beautiful chamber opera The Turn of the Screw. This event was the headline of my Classical Music Agenda on Sunday, and I knew it was going to be worth the modest ticket prices. At $35 to $50, it was about the same as the cheapest full-price ticket at the Washington National Opera and about one-fifth of the cost of the most expensive. Although the show was not officially sold out according to the Kennedy Center’s Web site, word had gotten out and the house was as close to full as one could hope.

As it turned out, this performance was the most convincing and fulfilling piece of operatic theater I have seen all season, and that includes all seven productions from the WNO. First of all, there is the work itself, which is one of the best-crafted examples of modern opera. Librettist Myfanwy Piper brilliantly adapted the novella of the same title by Henry James, a ghost story about two children haunted by the evil spirits of a former valet and governess in their house. In the book, the ghosts never speak, and it is easier to interpret the story in terms of the hysteric neurosis of the new governess, whose repressed sexual desires are transferred to her new employer, then to the boy entrusted to her, and then to the menacing ghost of the dead valet. Piper and Britten made the story rather different by giving the ghosts parts to sing, and in the opera their threats are much more real.