It wasn’t until almost 40 years after the opera’s Venice premiere and the composer’s own 1954 recording that The Turn of the Screw started to generate a small stream of competitive audio recordings. These were inspired by the younger and more modern-thinking stage directors and conductors, for whom the opera had become an essential yardstick for the repertoire of new chamber opera ensembles. Its blend of psychological whodunnit (or who imagined it?) with the hallmarks (but not the literal application) of atonality were attractively contemporary within familiar formats. A smaller – perhaps surprisingly smaller – number of video and DVD recordings has followed suit.

The scale of the piece itself has remained an interesting challenge. Britten and librettist Myfanwy Piper, in their interventionist takeover of Henry James’s story – the ghosts were not only seen but also heard to speak – certainly aimed at big from small. But how operatic should the results sound? Is the Governess an Italianate operatic lead, the tendency in many of the more recent recordings, or more of a Brechtian narrator? Is Quint a virtuoso weirdo showing off the tricks and turns of a tenor’s art?

The new release from La Monnaie – actually the Belgian company’s second, following a strongly cast commemorative release for the late Susan Chilcott – sits somewhere in the middle of these vocal controversies. Sally Matthews transfers her compelling stage presence into a more hysterical and nervous reading of the role than in her first recording (under Richard Farnes – LSO Live, 3/14), emotional in her commitment to the winning back of Miles’s soul but not always ideally clear of text.

Similarly, conductor Ben Glassberg is intent on setting a clear dramatic colour for each scene but sometimes overdoes it. An illuminating comparison point is the face-to-face Act 2 confrontation between the Governess and Miss Jessel (here neatly and precisely turned by Giselle Allen). Both Glassberg’s orchestra – in Britten’s Bergian accompaniment to the former governess – and Matthews’s protesting Governess of now can sound melodramatic. Britten’s 1954 premiere cast (Jennifer Vyvyan, Arda Mandikian) play a wider range of dynamics, including the score’s pianissimos, to his spookily atmospheric backing.

Elsewhere Hubbard is an energetic Quint, not always wholly comfortable with the tessitura and rarely truly frightening (at, for example, ‘Easy to take’). Carole Wilson is a solid, unmannered Mrs Grose and Thomas Heinen sounds a rather girl-like young Miles. The recording is most suitable and the orchestral woodwind outstanding. I wish we could see the abstract and balletic-looking stage production from which the performances are presumably drawn. There are very real pluses here but I wouldn’t prefer the newcomer to the old Britten or the very well-cast and -acted Daniel Harding (Erato), on which all of Joan Rodgers’s Governess, Ian Bostridge’s Quint and Vivian Tierney’s Jessel are marvellous.