Christopher Cerrone
In a Grove
Lindsay Kesselman, Chunyuan Liu, Andrew Turner, John Taylor Ward; Metropolis Ensemble
In a Circle ICR028 50:30 mins
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
