It remains full of flaws - mainly, clichés of mid-20th-century American ennui - yet in its current form, it is also a piece of subtlety and suggestion, a short story with the weight of a novel, an example of masterly craft and postmodern style. And in its best moments, the work gives you what Bernstein described on TV: the ability to make you feel the emotions he had when he was writing an at times painfully personal opera. And in the director Krzysztof Warlikowski, it has one of the European stage’s smartest interpreters of family dysfunction and sexual complexity, the opera’s central themes.Īt the end of Act II, Warlikowski adds a scene in which a boy sneakily watches that episode of “Young People’s Concerts” after his parents go to sleep. In the conductor Kent Nagano, the production has the world’s finest champion of “A Quiet Place,” who several years ago recorded Sunderland’s version and again leads it to brilliant and illuminating effect. That version, a sweeping rethinking of the piece’s dramaturgy and orchestration, has been altered again for the Paris Opera, which is giving Sunderland’s edition its most prominent staging yet in a new production that opened on Wednesday at the Palais Garnier. It was heavily criticized, and revised several times, culminating in 2013 with a version by Garth Edwin Sunderland that could give this work - in a genre that kept eluding Bernstein - a brighter future. “And the better it is, the more it will make you feel those emotions that the composer felt when he was writing.”īernstein was introducing Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, but he could just as easily have been speaking about his own music - even his grim and spiky final opera, “A Quiet Place.” With a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, this piece has had a tortured history, struggling to find its form before and after its 1983 premiere. “I guess most music is like that,” he added. PARIS - “We’re going to listen to music that describes emotions - feelings like pain, happiness, loneliness, anger, love,” Leonard Bernstein once said during an episode of his beloved, televised “Young People’s Concerts.” In Paris, a new production of “A Quiet Place” makes a strong case for a work that has long struggled to join the repertory.
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