Review: ‘A Quiet Place’ at Leonard Bernstein’s Paris Opera


PARIS — “We will listen to music about feelings such as pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love.” Leonard Bernstein once said during an episode one of his favorite “Young People’s Concerts” broadcast on television.

“I think most music is like that,” he added. “And the better it is, the more it will make you feel the emotions the composer felt as he wrote it.”

Bernstein was promoting Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, but he could also be talking about his own music—even his harsh and poignant final opera, A Quiet Place. With a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, this piece had a tortured history that struggled to find its form before and after its 1983 premiere. It was heavily criticized and revised several times, culminating with a release in 2013. by Garth Edwin Sunderland this could give this work – in a genre that escaped Bernstein – a brighter future.

Extensive rethinking of the piece’s dramaturgy and orchestration, this version has been modified for Paris Opera in a new production that gives Sunderland’s edition its most distinctive staging ever. opened on Wednesday At the Palais Garnier.

At Chef Kent Nagano, the production features the world’s best “A Quiet Place” champion who recorded his version of Sunderland a few years ago and takes it back to a bright and illuminating effect. And it has the director, Krzysztof Warlikowski, one of the most astute commentators on the European stage on the opera’s central themes of family dysfunction and sexual complexity.

II. At the end of the Act, Warlikowski adds a scene where a boy secretly watches that part of the “Young Folk Concerts” after his parents are asleep. And in its best moments, the piece gives you what Bernstein describes on television: the ability to convey the emotions he has when writing an opera that is sometimes painfully personal. It’s full of flaws—mainly the clichés of mid-20th-century American boredom—but in its current form it’s also a piece of sophistication and suggestion, a novel-heavy short story, a masterpiece and an example of mastery. postmodern style.

Inspired by Bernstein and Wadsworth’s own loss, “A Quiet Place,” the story of a mother’s death and the reconciliation she brings to her broken family, was originally created as a sequel to Bernstein’s satirical, jazzy one-act “Trouble in Tahiti.” From the early 1950s; They were first presented together as a punishingly-length double bill. Bernstein and Wadsworth revised “A Quiet Place” as a one-act, three-act work, combined with “Trouble in Tahiti” as flashbacks. This made for a long, maximalist score-filled evening for over 70 musicians, including electric guitar and synthesizer.

Sunderland’s version is leaner in every way. Its bitter bubbling removes “Trouble in Tahiti”, which clashes gracefully with the spiciness of “A Quiet Place,” reducing some characters while expanding others, restoring some cut arias. He reworked the score for just 18 players and the running time was reduced to approximately 90 minutes without a break.

For the Paris Opera, Sunderland retained the brevity, but the clarity of the 1st 2013 version, including the harpsichord and organ, as well as the instrumentation – a Goldilocks medium between 18 and 72 musicians – added wind and woodwind instruments. The electric guitar and synthesizer, which inevitably evokes the 1980s, thankfully still does not exist.

To avoid appearing dated, Warlikowski’s staging took place in 1983, but it is not a replica of his time. It takes place, facing each other, in a single room with high-walled sets that are at once familiar and impossible to place: the fashion of the time, surrounded by sleek, futuristic panels. Designed by Warlikowski’s frequent collaborator Malgorzata Szczesniak and so typical of his productions, spaces like these can feel simultaneously expansive and suffocating, and their characters tend to act accordingly, being both exposed and trapped.

Warlikowski is largely respectful of the otherwise libretto – with a few impressive interventions. Dinah, half of the unhappy couple of “Trouble in Tahiti”, is not in “A Quiet Place,” which begins with her funeral. But Warlikowski gives the role to a silent actor (Johanna Wokalek), who haunts throughout the scene with a mix of time and memory that projects the non-consecutive of the libretto’s slides into imagination and role play.

It’s one of the few ways Dinah is involved in this production, which opens with a video (by Kamil Polak) of the fatal car crash—probably a suicide, almost certainly under the influence—and for the shattering Act I postlude music, it reflects a project. His portrait on the coffin and crematorium. In it, he is the face of the post-WWII American ideal, but blank expression and double-edged smile From a painting by James Rosenquist.

They had two children – baritone Russell Braun – who was conspicuous, delicate and with a wide spectrum of emotional pain, anger and purposelessness – Dinah and her husband Sam. One is gay, mentally ill Junior (bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, gracefully and bitterly in his anger. “Dear Evan Hansen” in their persistent, visible neuroses); the other, Dede (soprano Claudia Boyle, who warmed up to the role as the evening continued).

The new member of the family is Dede’s husband (Frédéric Antoun, nervous at the peak of opera), François, whom Dede met through his ex-girlfriend Junior. If this shows incestuous behavior, wait: We learn that Junior and Dede experimented with each other as children.

Junior enters the funeral in a garish pink and purple cowboy outfit – a choice that makes sense when he is later retained and rejected by his mother, when he is represented as a child wearing the same costume. The opera’s juxtaposition of insanity and homosexuality has long been one of its problems, but Warlikowski helps a little by addressing Junior’s weirdness as coincident with him rather than the cause of his arresting development. Other badly obsolete things are also transcribed; Dinah’s misery-induced alcoholism deserves more sighs than sympathy.

There were more innovative American operas that premiered in the 1980s: Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha”; or the grand, almost legendary treatment of leaders in Anthony Davis’ world “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and John Adams “Nixon in China.” “A Quiet Place” now benefits from not being directly juxtaposed with them; it is now easier to meet on their own terms, which is neither avant-garde nor as keen to please as Bernstein’s previous work.

And while it sometimes sounds like a rote vomit of post-war culture and its misery, the ambiguous ending is somewhat of a departure from these clichés. In Warlikowski’s staging, Bernstein’s restless final chords accompany an image of Dinah’s family sharing a sofa. For them, the only way forward is forgiveness – not the most common way to end an opera, but the memory of a classic: Janacek’s “Jenufa.”

Take a closer look at four: Sam and Junior are reunited; Francois; and Dede, visibly annoyed, distances herself from her husband. They are still suffering, in a cycle that you can see continuing to this day. The distinctly American darkness of “A Quiet Place” may be more relevant than we’d like to think.

A Quiet Place

At the Paris Opera until March 30; operadeparis.fr.



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