Opera at home

CDs

A QUIET PLACE

BERNSTEIN

Decca 4833895

2018 marks the centennial of the birth of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) and one of the year’s tributes is a new recording of his last work for the stage, the opera A Quiet Place, with a strong young cast and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM) and Chorus conducted by OSM Music Director Kent Nagano.

Premiered in 1983 in Houston, A Quiet Place was intended as a sequel to Trouble in T ahiti (1952), Bernstein’s jazz-influenced one-act satire on 1950s American suburban life centred on the married couple Sam and Dinah. For A Quiet Place, Bernstein and librettist Stephen Wadsworth advanced the time by 30 years, when Sam and the now-adult children are grieving the death of Dinah after a recent car crash.

Enter Nagano, who had worked with Bernstein on the 1986 Vienna performances. In 2013 he engaged composer, arranger and Senior Music Editor of the Leonard Bernstein Office, Garth Edwin Sunderland, to revise the opera by reinserting some of the music cut in 1986, as well as excising that version’s Trouble in Tahiti flashback. He also trimmed down the thick orchestration from an ensemble of over seventy to just eighteen.

The new chamber version was recorded live at Montréal’s Maison Symphonique in May 2017 and is now just over 90 minutes long. Typical of Bernstein, the opera comments on changes and developments in 20-century American society. But listeners hoping for the Broadway-like tunes of West Side Story and Candide will be disappointed. Bernstein’s late musical style is more dissonant, austere and complex.

Although the overall message is dark and depressing, there are warm, tender moments and even some lighter ones. At the top of Act III, while Sam and Dinah’s grown children, Junior