Bernstein - A Quiet Place

The Guardian 80

A two-CD chamber reduction of Leonard Bernstein’s 1986 opera, with Kent Nagano conducting the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, brings its seriousness into focus

Leonard Bernstein composed one of the greatest of all musicals in West Side Story, as well as, in Candide, one of the few 20th-century comic operas that is likely to persist in the repertory. But until the end of his life he kept trying to write the great American opera – something that would hold up a truthful mirror to American life in the second half of the 20th century. A Quiet Place, first performed in Houston in 1983, was his final attempt and also his last stage work. He and his librettist Stephen Wadsworth designed it as a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, the jazzy, frothy one-acter he’d composed in 1952. Looking in on the same family 30 years on, the opera begins with the central character from the earlier work, Sam, struggling to come to terms with the death of his wife, Dinah, in a car crash.

When it was first performed, A Quiet Place was a four-scene one-acter using a large orchestra. But after its less than enthusiastic reception, Bernstein and Wadsworth revised the work, cutting some scenes and jettisoning subsidiary characters, as well as reworking the finale, and incorporating the whole of Trouble in Tahiti into the second act of what became, in 1986, a full-length, three-act opera. That was the version of the score that Bernstein recorded for Deutsche Grammophon the following year.