BBC Music Magazine: In A Grove Review

Steph Power from BBC Music Magazine rates In A Grove with five out of five stars. More info »

★★★★★
Of the many adaptations inspired by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s crime-mystery tale In a Grove, the most celebrated is Rashōmon, Kurosawa’s searching 1950 film about the nature of truth and justice. Shifting the location to an eerie, post-wildfire Oregon forest, composer Christopher Cerrone and librettist Stephanie Fleischmann set the story in 1921 – around the time it was first published – and focus no less piercingly on its liminal qualities.
Described as ‘an opera in seven testimonies’, the fallibility of human perception is rendered in a taut, mesmeric soundworld featuring a strikingly expressive use of electronics. Eight characters are assigned to four excellent singers who, combined with a subtle-hued Metropolis Ensemble, bring the story grippingly alive within Cerrone’s lushly circular, almost ritualistic harmonic frame.
A woodcutter has found a settler’s body in a grove. An outlaw is arrested for murder, and readily confesses to the crime. But where is the wife of the dead man – and what actually unfolded in that lonely place? Conflicting memories paint vividly convincing pictures of events which, while starkly real in their violence and lethal consequences, remain somehow elusive and unresolved – despite the creators’ decision to make explicit an unexpected, underlying cause of death.
Indeed, the cause of death itself becomes part of the fabric of the unknown and unforeseen which permeates this compelling work. Everyone, it seems, has something to confess, and it’s the ensuing tapestry of shame and regret that ultimately gives rise to deceit, murder and rape – the last sensitively handled, and laudably preserving the victim’s agency.