New York Times: Five Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

Joshua Barone from The New York Times reviews In A Grove for their regular roundup of classical music highlights. More info »

I didn’t see the premiere of Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera “In a Grove” in Pittsburgh last year. But this recording makes me feel as though I’ve come face-to-face with it.
That’s because the album — vividly produced by Cerrone, Mike Tierney and Andrew Cyr, who here also conducts the nimble Metropolis Ensemble — is not a mere document of the premiere, but a creation of its own, carefully considered for the studio in the manner of Meredith Monk’s stage works.
The result is an hourlong immersion into the nearly suffocating mood and atmosphere of “In a Grove,” an adaptation of the Ryunosuke Akutagawa story of the same name that also inspired “Rashomon.” In Fleischmann’s straightforward yet poetically loaded libretto, the plot is moved to the Pacific Northwest of the 1920s, where the mystery of a man’s death is examined from distorted, conflicting perspectives — resolving only once he tells his side from beyond the grave, and even then offering only one answer among many questions raised.
Two roles each are given to four singers, who dramatically embody Cerrone’s tense, direct vocal writing, which occasionally takes a sudden plunge doubled in the instruments. The music also knows more about the truth than the characters do; electronic processing flags gaps in memory or untrustworthy statements, endlessly complicating the text, and commanding attention until the end.