IN A GROVE
an opera in seven testimonies
ny premiere
Prototype Festival, January 2025
co-produced by Pittsburgh Opera & Metropolis Ensemble
directed by Mary Birnbaum
The New York Times’ “Best Classical Performances of 2025”
studio album
with Metropolis Ensemble, July 2023
on In a Circle Records
designed by still-room
press
NY Times 5 Classical Music Recordings You can Listen to Right Now
”Poetically loaded libretto…vividly produced…a creation of its own, carefully considered for the studio…commanding attention until the end.”
NY Times Best Classical Music Albums of 2023
”A vividly immersive thriller…not a word or note are without purpose, and both are captured, if not enhanced, in this richly produced recording.”
BBC Music Magazine
”Taut, mesmeric soundworld… grippingly alive…”
Gramophone
”An engrossing and complete experience.”
read more CD reviews
“A Mesmerizing debut”
stage premiere
Pittsburgh Opera, February 2022
commissioned by Los Angeles Opera
directed by Mary Birnbaum
designed by Mimi Lien, Yuki Nakase-Link, and Oana Botez
2022 Broadway World Pittsburgh Regional Awards Best Opera Production—audience choice
A silent, expectant grove. A fatal encounter between a man, a woman, and a thief. Seven testimonies, each offering a clashing perspective on the crime. The shifting viewpoints of Akutagawa’s classic short story, on which Rashomon was based, lend themselves eloquently to music’s ability to conjure, via repetition and variation, the ways perception is colored by emotions and vulnerable 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 haunting new adaptation, set in the aftermath of a wildfire in the Pacific Northwest, 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.
Mary Birnbaum’s dynamic runway staging places the audience on either side of the playing space, so that every viewer’s experience is unique. Four transformative performers inhabit eight roles, each becoming both witness and perpetrator. Fog enshrouds the space as each successive testimony plunges us into ever more fallible regions of the human heart, drawing the audience progressively deeper into the ghost forest that is the grove.
IN A GROVE WEBSITE
duration
53 minutes
forces
countertenor, baritone, tenor, soprano; 7 instrumentalists.
other productions
Eastman Conservatory of Music, November 2025
Opera Saratoga, June, 2025—site-specific installation
Northwestern University Bienen School of Music, November 2022
conducted by Alan Pierson, directed by Joachim Schamberger
development
Workshop: Mannes, the New School, September 2021
Music Workshop: Frost School of Music, U Miami, Spring 2021Workshop/Residency: Mass MoCA, October 2019
Excerpt in concert: Morgan Library, American Lyric Theater, March 2019
Workshop/Residency, Mahagony Opera’s Various Stages Festival, London, England, February 2017
SCORE
LIBRETTO
“This year’s highlight was Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s “In a Grove,” a taut, time-bending meditation on truth and violence…AN EXQUISITELY FRACTURED PUZZLE.”
“Rarely does a new opera emerge so perfectly formed, let alone presented in a production as musically and visually stunning”
Sited within a ghost forest in the Pacific Northwest in 1922, this adaptation of Akutagawa’s classic tale 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 riven by class struggle and fear of the other, this searing examination into the impossibility of truth manifests a world whose environment is under siege, in which wildly veering personal truths vie with absolute fact, shattering what we think we know.
Akutagawa’s story is a rich provocation, challenging us to scrutinize the ways in which memory—a construct of sound, image and language—interacts with societal power structures and deeply felt personal truths to manufacture competing notions of fact. Made up of a series of emotionally colored, subjective recountings, the opera is suffused with an intensity of focus—spare, architectonic, haunted and haunting, as moving as it is suspenseful.
“ Mesmerising. The variations grow more meaningful and tragic as they pass, and the effect grows hypnotic. … a moving experience.”
“Director Mary Birnbaum places the performers on an empty runway, like the footbridge on a Kabuki stage…Singers Mikaela Bennett, John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, and Paul Appleby carried the show with trembling passion and immaculate skill…The heady, throbbing, percussive score…tragic story and ingenious staging left me feeling (in the best way possible) like I, too, had just discovered a murdered man on a walk through a burning forest. In a Grove is a triumph.”
photo: Maria Baranova
“I have come to this place seeking refuge.
From what happened on the mountain.
From the truth.
I want nothing more
than to cover it up, block it out.
But you would have me remember, recount.”
“FINELY TUNED LIBRETTO…
SUPERB STAGING…REMARKABLE SCORE…AN OPERA FOR THE 21st CENTURY…
EPIC….AN OPERA THAT WILL LINGER LONG IN MY MEMORY.”
— Opera News