Pittsburgh Opera Premieres Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s In a Grove, a Co-Production with LA Opera

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Katy Salomon | Morahan Arts and Media
katy@morahanartsandmedia.com | 863.660.2214

Pittsburgh Opera Presents the World Premiere of
Composer Christopher Cerrone and Librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s
In a Grove, February 19 – March 3, 2022

Commissioned by LA Opera, In a Grove, Based on a Story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa,
Offers a Searing Investigation into the Impossibility and Elusiveness of Truth

Watch Excerpts of In a Grove with the Score | Read the In a Grove Libretto

“For Cerrone music is a textural and rhythmic playground with few rules and zero limitations,
his clarity of intent bringing integrity to every phrase.”
– The Sydney Morning Herald

www.christophercerrone.com | www.stephaniefleischmann.com

Pittsburgh, PA (December 7, 2021) — GRAMMY-nominated composer and Pulitzer Prize finalist Christopher Cerrone’s new opera In a Grove, featuring a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann, receives its world premiere performances by Pittsburgh Opera from February 19 - March 3, 2022. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, and Metropolis Ensemble, In a Grove is based on a short story of the same name by Ryunosuke Akutagawa and follows seven witness testimonies to a murder, each clashing in perspective, offering a searing investigation into the impossibility and elusiveness of truth. LA Opera will present the west coast premiere of In a Grove in a future season.

Sited within a ghost forest in the Pacific Northwest in 1922, the opera unfolds within a barren, haunted landscape devastated by wildfire. Into a terrain of broken dreams, marred by violence and obfuscated by smoke, comes a young woman who upends conventional notions of gender and narratives of victimhood, claiming agency for herself. Transpiring within a frontier territory driven by class struggle and fear of the other, this retelling of Akutagawa’s tale—famously adapted as the film Rashomon—manifests a world in which the environment is under siege, and wildly veering personal truths vie with absolute fact, shattering what one thinks they know.

Four singers are double cast, each assuming the character of both witness to and participant in the crime. A medium communicates with the ghost of the victim, straddling the thin line between the living and the dead, with no more access to the truth than anyone else. Electronic vocal processing will be used as characters speak for others, altering the facts, whether via blurrings of memory or intention. The Pittsburgh Opera cast includes Yazid Gray as The Woodcutter and The Outlaw (Luther Harlow), Andrew Turner as Policeman and The Man (Ambrose Raines), Madeline Ehlinger as Leona Raines and Leona’s Mother, and Chuanyuan Liu as the Priest and the Medium. Nine instrumentalists, accompanied by a bed of site-reactive electronics, also function as characters, or facets of them, each in concert with a different testimonial.

Christopher Cerrone discovered Akutagawa’s short story In a Grove in the fall of 2014 while beginning to research a follow-up to his 2013 opera, Invisible Cities, which was a 2014 Pulitzer Prize Finalist for Music. He explains, “In Akutagawa’s story, I found a complex and multifaceted tale where the whole notion of objective truth was impossible; we, the readers, are left to decide for ourselves what happened. I thought this story, with its unique structure, would make the perfect opera. The shifting perspectives and changing repetitions of a single event would allow me to use the language of music to create an opera where the events are told and retold in pristine emotional detail; where the shifting and faulty memory of characters can be reinforced by vocal distortion and reverb.”

Cerrone continues, “Having been introduced to Stephanie Fleischmann’s lyrical and impactful libretti, I enlisted her to join the project. She brought a new nuance and complexity to the story – coloring in the details of our characters’ lives. Now set in the Pacific Northwest in the rubble of a wildfire, our adaptation – a feminist retelling – focuses on the tragedy of conflicting personal truths. Every main character confesses to the murder of a man named Ambrose (a nod to the American writer Ambrose Bierce, an inspiration to Akutagawa); it is their inability to communicate with one another that drives the engine of the opera’s conflict. As the subsequent years have passed, our society feels at a precipice where basic facts can no longer be agreed upon. As a result, the tale of this opera feels increasingly urgent.”

The shifting viewpoints of Akutagawa’s classic short story lend themselves eloquently to music’s ability to conjure, via repetition and variation, the ways human perception is fallible, imprecise, and subject to interference. Characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, composer Christopher Cerrone’s music balances lushness and austerity, immersive textures, and telling details. This dynamic new adaptation melds the dramatic impact and interiority of Cerrone’s unique voice with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann’s charged, poetic text to produce a powerful interrogation into how we see, hear, remember, and believe.

Director Mary Birnbaum’s concept for In a Grove takes inspiration from James Turrell and Fujiko Nakaya, artists whose work renders subtle changes in perception: Viewers will enter a space already activated, via sound, light and fog – a tool used to obscure, to manipulate, perspicacity. Designed to inhabit a relatively intimate black box, the environment will feel as if it is progressively closing in around the audience, drawing them into the metaphysical space of the grove, a place where the ground shifts beneath their feet. This is a space of ambiguity and clarity, of beauty and menace, fragility and strength – in which a visceral sense of immediacy is amplified by the shifting psychic terrain and vast emotional space of the music.

Program Information
Pittsburgh Opera Presents In a Grove
Saturday, February 19, 2022 at 8:00pm
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 at 7:00pm
Friday, February 25, 2022 at 7:30pm
Sunday, February 27, 2021 at 2:00pm
Tuesday, March 1, 2022 at 7:00pm
Thursday, March 3, 2022 at 7:30pm
Tickets: $25-50
Link: pittsburghopera.org/grove

Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann – In a Grove (2021) [World Premiere]

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera with additional support from Raulee Marcus and Stephen Block, Pittsburgh Opera, and Metropolis Ensemble.

Cast and Crew:
Woodcutter / The Outlaw (Luther Harlow): Yazid Gray*
Policeman / The Man (Ambrose Raines): Andrew Turner*
Leona Raines / Leona’s Mother: Madeline Ehlinger*
Priest / Medium: Chuanyuan Liu

Composer: Christopher Cerrone
Libretto: Stephanie Fleischmann
Conductor: Antony Walker
Stage Director: Mary Birnbaum
Assistant Stage Director: Kaley Karis Smith*
Set Designer: Mimi Lien
Costume Designer: Oana Botez
Lighting Designer: Yuki Nakase
Stage Manager: Alex W. Seidel
Asst Stage Manager: Hannah Nathan

   Pittsburgh Opera Debut
*     Pittsburgh Opera Resident Artist

About Christopher Cerrone
Christopher Cerrone (b. 1984) is internationally acclaimed for compositions characterized by a subtle handling of timbre and resonance, a deep literary fluency, and a flair for multimedia collaborations. Balancing lushness and austerity, immersive textures and telling details, dramatic impact, and interiority, Cerrone’s multi-GRAMMY-nominated music is utterly compelling and uniquely his own.

The 2021-22 season will see the premiere of In a Grove, a new opera composed with librettist Stephanie Fleischmann that was commissioned by LA Opera and will premiere at Pittsburgh Opera in February 2022. Cerrone will also compose a new clarinet quintet jointly commissioned by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Omega Ensemble, Third Angle New Music, and Chatter ABQ. And in April 2022, the Phoenix Symphony will premiere The Age of Wire and String, a new orchestral suite as part of a Cerrone-curated program.

The 2021–22 season will also see the premiere of The Last Message Received, jointly commissioned by Northwestern University and the Yale Symphony Orchestra and Glee Club, as well as new works for pianist David Kaplan, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, cellist Johannes Moser, and pianist Anthony DeMare (the Liaisons project, adapting the music of Stephen Sondheim).

Recent highlights include A Body, Moving, concerto for brass and orchestra commissioned by the Cincinnati Symphony; The Air Suspended, a piano concerto for pianist Shai Wosner; Don’t Look Down, a concerto grosso for Conor Hanick and Sandbox Percussion that premiered at Caramoor; The Insects Became Magnetic, an orchestral work with electronics for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Meander Spiral, Explode, a percussion quartet concerto co-commissioned by the Civic Orchestra of the Chicago Symphony and the Britt Festival; and Breaks and Breaks, an acclaimed violin concerto for Jennifer Koh and the Detroit Symphony.

Cerrone’s first opera, Invisible Cities, a 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist, was praised by the Los Angeles Times as “A delicate and beautiful opera…[which] could be, and should be, done anywhere.” Invisible Cities received its fully-staged world premiere in a wildly popular production by The Industry, directed by Yuval Sharon, in Los Angeles’ Union Station. Both the film and opera are available as CDs, DVDs, and digital downloads. In July 2019, New Amsterdam Records released his GRAMMY-nominated sophomore effort, The Pieces that Fall to Earth, a collaboration with the LA-based chamber orchestra, Wild Up, to widespread acclaim. His most recent release, The Arching Path, released on In a Circle Records, was also nominated for a 2022 GRAMMY. Cerrone is the winner of the 2015-2016 Samuel Barber Rome Prize in Music Composition.

Christopher Cerrone holds degrees from the Yale School of Music and the Manhattan School of Music. His work is published by Schott NY and Project Schott New York and in 2021 he joined the composition faculty at Mannes School of Music. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Carrie Sun. Learn more at www.christophercerrone.com.

About Stephanie Fleischmann
Stephanie Fleischmann is a librettist and playwright whose texts serve as blueprints for intricate three-dimensional sonic and visual worlds. Her “lyrical monologues” (The New York Times), “smart” opera libretti (Opera News), plays, and music-theater works have been performed internationally and across the United States.

Upcoming opera libretti: Dido, with Melinda Wagner, for Dawn Upshaw/Brentano Quartet, commissioned by Hopkins Center, 92nd Street Y, Rockport Music, Interlochen, Wake Forest University, Chamber Music Northwest, University of Maryland; Another City, with Jeremy Howard Beck, for Houston Grand Opera; The Pigeon Keeper, with David Hanlon, for Santa Fe Opera/Opera for All Voices; Arkhipov, with Peter Knell, developed c/o Seattle Opera & Jacaranda. Operas premiered: Poppaea, with Michael Hersch, commissioned by Wien Moderne, Vienna, & ZeitRäume Basel Biennale für Neue Musik und Architektur; The Long Walk, with Jeremy Howard Beck, commissioned by American Lyric Theater, premiered at Opera Saratoga, subsequent performances at Utah Opera, Pittsburgh Opera; After the Storm, with David Hanlon, commissioned by HGOco; The Property, with Wlad Marhulets, commissioned by Chicago Lyric Unlimited. Current collaborations: Matthew Recio (Chicago Opera Theater; West Edge’s Aperture Sprints 1 & 3), Julia Adolphe (developed via Opera America Female Composers Discovery Grant, National Sawdust Residency), Justine F. Chen (OAFCDG & Manhattan School of Music), Christina Campanella (OAFCDG). Texts for voice: Anna Clyne (Scottish National Chamber Orchestra & Chorus), Chris Cerrone (Yale/Northeastern), Gity Razaz (Brooklyn Youth Chorus), Olga Neuwirth (Aldeburgh, Basel, Berlin).

Selected plays/music-theater works: Dio (Daniel Kluger); Sound House (the Flea/New Georges); The Visitation, a sound walk (HERE) and Red Fly/Blue Bottle (HERE; EMPAC, Noorderzon, NL), both with Christina Campanella and Mallory Catlett; Niagara (Bobby Previte/Daniel Fish; Hudson Opera House); The Secret Lives of Coats (Red Eye, Minneapolis); The Sweetest Life (New Victory LabWorks); Eloise & Ray (New Georges); Orpheus (HERE). Her works for theater have been performed/developed at the Roundhouse Studio (London), Exit Festival (France), MASS MoCA, Birmingham Rep (UK), Synchronicity (Atlanta), Roadworks (Chicago), Son of Semele (Los Angeles) and in New York at Soho Rep, Mabou Mines/SUITE, the Public Theater.

She has received grants from: Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation (the first given to a librettist), Venturous Theater Fund, Howard Foundation Fellowship in Playwriting, 3 NYSCA Individual Artist Commissions (including 2 for her libretti), NEA Opera/Music-Theater, 3 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships, Tennessee Williams Fellowship, Frederick Loewe and Whitfield Cook Awards; MAPFund, Opera America Repertoire Development Fund, NY State Music Fund, Greenwall Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Fund. Residencies: Macdowell, Hedgebrook. Alumna: New Dramatists; New Georges Audrey Residency/New Georges affiliated writer; American Lyric Theater; HARP; former Playwrights Center Core Writer. B.F.A.: Wesleyan University; M.F.A.: Brooklyn College. She taught playwriting at Skidmore College for 9 years. Learn more at www.stephaniefleischmann.com.

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