This season, Curtis joins the worldwide centenary celebrations of Leonard Bernstein, a 1941 conducting graduate, who took the stage and podium at the school in his early twenties just before launching the meteoric career that led to composing West Side Story and international acclaim as a conductor.
Directed by Daniel Fish, the Philadelphia production marks the first time the chamber adaptation has been fully staged.
“This chamber ensemble will not encompass the sheer volume and overwhelming force of the original orchestration, but it instead has a transparency, and an intimacy, that are appropriate to the opera’s themes and its characters, and that allow for a different perspective on Bernstein’s score.”Ĭorrado 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.
“My goal was to preserve Bernstein’s intentions for the sound-world and the drama of his music, while using a radically scaled-down orchestra of 18 musicians,” said Sunderland. Trouble in Tahiti-originally incorporated as a flashback midway through the opera-is removed, and the orchestra is reduced in size. In Sunderland’s 90-minute adaptation, premiered in a 2013 concert production with Kent Nagano and Ensemble Modern in Berlin, arias written for Sam and François are restored. Unhappy memories and long-buried resentments surface, and the survivors have a choice: to hurt one another again-or to heal. A concert production will be performed in New York City on March 13 in at the Kaye Playhouse at Hunter College.īest known for creating cultural touchstones like West Side Story, On the Waterfront, and Candide, Bernstein called A Quiet Place “unlike any work I have ever written or seen.” The opera revisits the unhappy suburban family from his 1951 one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti three decades later, only to find them reeling in the wake of tragedy.
Performances take place in Philadelphia on March 7, 9, and 11 at the Perelman Theater, presented in partnership with Opera Philadelphia and the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts as part of the recently launched Curtis Opera Theatre at the Perelman series. The Curtis Institute of Music celebrates the centenary of its famous alumnus, Leonard Bernstein, with performances of A Quiet Place in Philadelphia and New York March 7–13, marking the American premiere of Garth Edwin Sunderland’s 2013 chamber adaptation of Bernstein’s final opera. Philadelphia March 7–11 and New York City March 13 “Some of Bernstein’s most potent late-period music” ( The New Yorker)
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