Recommended Recording
June Andersen, Jerry Hadley, Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, London Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein. DG 429 734-2. The legacy of two spectacular concert performances at the Barbican in 1989, with contributions from the Broadway veteran Adolph Green and a lot of chutzpah.
FORM: Opera in one act; in English
COMPOSER: Leonard Bernstein (1918–90)
LIBRETTO: Stephen Wadsworth
FIRST PERFORMANCE: Milan, 17 June 1983
Principal Characters
Sam, the father
Sam Junior, his son
Dede, Sam’s daughter
François, Dede’s husband
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: Contemporary America
The funeral of Sam’s wife, Dinah, killed in a car crash, brings together the estranged members of her family: Sam Junior, his sister and her husband, François, who at one time was Sam Junior’s lover. Underlying tensions quickly surface and Junior’s mental instability becomes apparent. In the evening the four recall the history of their relationships with each other and with their dead mother. The next morning, after breakfast and games in the garden (the ‘quiet place’), they find that their hostility has given way to reconciliation.
Music and Background
The operatic equivalent of a Russian doll, A Quiet Place is actually one piece inside another: most of the middle act is the self-contained Trouble in Tahiti written thirty years earlier, and its music sounds markedly different to what comes before and after. The Tahiti sections are in lyrical, near-Broadway style, with sardonic contributions from a 1950s close-harmony trio who hymn the idealised joys of suburban life while the suburban characters, Dinah and Sam, demonstrate the bleak realities. The surrounding sections are musically more complex, less direct and less memorable – although Bernstein’s sense of melody is always there, not far below the surface.
Highlights
Almost all the best writing comes in the middle, Tahiti act, climaxing in a virtuoso comic monologue for Dinah, ‘Island Magic’, that would be pure Broadway but for its rhythmic complications, and finishing on a soaring, seriously dramatic duet, ‘Is there a day or a night?’, which is Bernstein at his soul-searing best.
Did You Know?
Recommended Recording
Chester Ludgin, Beverly Morgan, Wendy White, Edward Crafts, Austrian Radio Symphony Orchestra/Leonard Bernstein. DG 419 761-1/2. The only one, recorded live at the Vienna Staatsoper.
(1934– )
Punch and Judy (1967)
Down by the Greenwood Side (1969)
The Mask of Orpheus (1984)
Yan Tan Tethera (1984)
Gawain (1991)
The Second Mrs Kong (1994)
Birtwistle’s tough, dense, and often abrasively loud music has made him a sort of Public Enemy for some concert-goers, a fair number of whom filled the correspondence pages of British newspapers with letters of complaint after his raucous concerto for saxophone and percussion, Panic, was premiered at the last night of the 1995 Proms. But others find him a grainy, granite-hard successor to the English Pastoral composers of the early 20th century, with an underlying lyricism in his writing. And no one could deny that Birtwistle’s music is dramatic. Even his concert works have ritualistic theatre elements, and his stage works proper are usually based on mythical subjects which he adapts to the ritualised kind of story-telling which he has made his own, with events that repeat in cycles rather than unfold in linear terms. The Mask of Orpheus, for example, is a vast multimedia spectacle with electronic effects and a highly complex formal structure which recounts the myth of Orpheus in all its varying forms and different endings. Brought up in Manchester, Birtwistle was a student there at the same time as Peter Maxwell Davies and the careers of the two composers have progressed largely in tandem. Both now have knighthoods, and jockey for position as the leading creative figure in British music after Michael Tippett.
FORM: Opera in two acts; in English
COMPOSER: Harrison Birtwistle (1934– )
LIBRETTO: David Harsent; from an anonymous 14th-century poem
FIRST PERFORMANCE: London, 30 May 1991
Principal Characters
Gawain, a knight and King Arthur’s nephew
Morgan le Fay, a sorceress
Green Knight/Bertilak
Lady de Hautdesert, Bertilak’s wife
Synopsis of the Plot
Setting: Arthurian Britain
ACT I While Arthur and his court are celebrating Christmas, the sorceress,