Christopher Cerrone - In A Grove (2023) Hi-Res

In a Circle Records proudly presents In a Grove, an opera with music by Christopher Cerrone and a libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann. A full-length follow-up to Cerrone’s GRAMMY-nominated 2021 album, The Arching Path, In a Grove features singers soprano Lindsay Kesselman, countertenor Chuanyuan Liu, tenor Andrew Turner, and baritone John Taylor Ward, accompanied by the intrepid Metropolis Ensemble.

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.

As a studio recording, the work becomes a sonic drama. As with other recent studio projects (including 2019’s The Pieces that Fall to Earth and 2021’s The Arching Path, both nominated for GRAMMY awards), it was co-produced by Cerrone, Mike Tierney, and Andrew Cyr. They created a new kind of opera album, utilizing overdubbing, multi-tracking, close-micing, compression, and other studio techniques to create a brand-new sonic world, entirely different from the one created on stage.

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.