A Quiet Place, chamber version
Corrado Rovaris, conductor; Daniel Fish, director; David Zinn
Composer, conductor, author, and music icon Leonard Bernstein is still fascinating audiences 100 years after his birth. Best known for creating cultural touchstones like West Side Story, On the Waterfront, and Candide, he called A Quiet Place “unlike any work I have ever written or seen.” The opera revisits the unhappy suburban family from Trouble in Tahiti thirty years later, only to find them reeling in the wake of tragedy. Unhappy memories and long-buried resentments surface, and the survivors have a choice: to hurt one another again—or to heal. The chamber adaptation by Garth Edwin Sunderland receives its American premiere from the Curtis Opera Theatre, in a production by director Daniel Fish. Corrado Rovaris, Opera Philadelphia’s Jack Mulroney Music Director, leads members of the Curtis Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein’s dramatic music–by turns explosive, elegiac, and playful–given a more intimate scale in Sunderland’s orchestration.
