CONCERT REVIEW
January 20, 2025
New York Times: In A Grove at Prototype — Review
Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim from The New York Times reviewed the best of Prototype Festival including our production of In A Grove:
Even before news of his death broke on Thursday, the spirit of the director David Lynch hovered over the Prototype Festival. For 12 years, this annual showcase of experimental opera and music theater has hewed to a Lynchian aesthetic, with works that mine emotional extremes and blur the boundaries of reality… But what makes Prototype such a generative force in opera is the focus on the human voice in all its beauty and its weirdness.
…
The highlight of the festival was Christopher Cerrone’s “In a Grove,” a haunting psychological thriller with a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, at La MaMa. (This production had its premiere in Pittsburgh in 2022.) The opera is based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa that describes the deadly encounter between a brigand and a married couple from multiple perspectives, including that of the murdered husband speaking through a medium. Each retelling deepens the mystery of how the man died and what happened between the woman and the stranger.
The opera transports the action to a forest in 19th-century America devastated by wildfires. The first sounds are an electronic haze that swirls like an auditory representation of the dry ice shrouding the set designer Mimi Lien’s narrow catwalk intersected by a movable pane of glass. The music (performed by the Metropolis Ensemble) grows out of this white noise. Over the course of the opera, as characters deliver their testimonies, the tensely tonal music behaves like a single mass that billows and drifts, ponders and pounces, but never falls silent.
Stylized yet sensual, the vocal lines glide along the surface of this instrumental texture. The vocal writing has an old-fashioned elegance that is artfully distorted at crucial moments by electronic processing. Sometimes it’s just a little tremor or pitch bending that reveals the intervention of machines. But when the baritone John Brancy, darkly erotic in the role of the outlaw, gives his testimony, his low notes ring out with a nightmarish buzz.
The outstanding cast also included the blooming lyricism of the tenor Paul Appleby, the luxuriously cool soprano of Mikaela Bennett and the iridescent countertenor of Chuanyuan Liu as a monk and medium. The score is eerily detached from the singers: Though individual instruments might double a line or even an isolated note sung by one of the characters, the music doesn’t reveal whether it believes — whether we are to believe — anyone.