![]() What A Quiet Place is - and how it's perceived - remains in a great state of flux. Tyler Zimmerman sang intelligently but, as the thorny Dad, missed much of his character's deep wells of anguish. Jean-Michel Richer gave a suitably French timbre to the French-Canadian character Francois.Īs the mentally ill Junior, Dennis Chmelensky articulated his fractured vocal lines in ways that perhaps set a new standard for the role - while also projecting a flamboyant battiness that suited the character well. As daughter Dede, Ashley Milanese immediately established her vocal charisma, and maintained it in some of Bernstein's more difficult vocal writing, culminating in an emotionally profound communion with her deceased mother. When we realized how messed up the Quiet Place family is at the end of Act I, the production had a huge photo of the burning Hindenburg (which has way too many possible interpretations). But the Curtis production's use of the technology, by video designer Jeff Larson, had far greater emotional impact. Similarly aged video appeared in Fish's portrait of a 1940s movie star in the Michael Gordon opera Acquanetta. I t was 20 years after his death before Leonard Bernstein's opera A Quiet Place finally got to be performed in New York, the city he lived in for close on half a century. In place of the Broadway-tinged songs of Tahiti, it's a continual operatic outpouring that is as harmonically unstable as its characters. Trouble in Tahiti is not part of the new Garth Edwin Sunderland edition of A Quiet Place, which attempts to stand on its own. When it's seen at all, this 1983 portrait of a family shattered by its mother's suicide is usually presented in conjunction with Bernstein's earlier jazz chamber opera Trouble in Tahiti, where these characters start down their long, stultifying road to emotional isolation and life lived in default settings. Those who like opera without easy answers and those who are curious about Bernstein simultaneously utilizing and rejecting everything he knows will find the experience to be stimulating - though incomplete. ![]() ![]() 7) - with significant help from Curtis Opera Theatre's new production of the opera that opened Wednesday at the Kimmel Center's Perelman Theater. Leonard Bernstein's late-period opera A Quiet Place may yet ascend to that loose-ends pantheon (also occupied by Mahler's Symphony No. ![]() The world is full of messy artistic masterworks that defy the usual aesthetics because they go to places that are hard to reach any other way. ![]()
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