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Robin Bailey (Analyst), Kirsty McLean and Peter Edge (Trio) | Photo: Marc Brenner

Plenty of composers took a swing at the Great American Opera. Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and George Gershwin all gave it their best shot. Leonard Bernstein’s entry is a curious affair.  

1983’s A Quiet Place harks back to the composer’s earlier one-acter Trouble in Tahiti, revisiting Sam and Dinah’s 1950s suburban dream and strained marriage thirty years on. It’s not a piece we hear often, a big, bruised, angry work covered in finger marks from rethinks and rewrites, baggy from being stretched into new and ambitious shapes (at one point swallowing Tahiti whole, turning it into an extended flashback sequence).  

But as a bookend, an answer to the glossy bubblegum cynicism of its prequel, it’s fascinating: a document of a changing nation, and composer. 

The Royal Opera’s artistic director Oliver Mears reunites Tahiti with a chamber version of A Quiet Place (created in 2013 by Garth Edwin Sunderland, and given its full UK premiere here by Nicholas Chalmers and the ROH Orchestra) that restores it to something fairly close to the composer’s first thoughts, making a substantial double bill.  

'Grief is a kind of music,' the funeral director (a fluting Nick Pritchard) declares glibly, as family and friends gather for Dinah’s send-off at the start of A Quiet Place. But what kind? Bernstein’s answer arrives jagged and sardonic, melodic corners knocked off, wrestling with competing musical memories: a score haunted by happier times. With Dinah dead from an apparent suicide, and Sam (Grant Doyle) and their two damaged children Junior (Henry Neill) and Dede (Rowan Pierce) reunited in the family home, he sets up a Greek tragedy of slow-burn dramatic reveals. 

Henry Neill (Sam) | Photo: Marc Brenner

But the musical punches come swift and fast. Percussion (split across sides in the Linbury, like a pincer-movement assault) supplies convulsive, teeth-chattering tension, breaking rhythms bent so artfully into jazz contortions in Tahiti, while the voices battle in densely layered ensembles.  

Mears leans into that tension in an efficient single-space staging that cages the action of both operas inside arsenic-green walls. Minimal props preserve Bernstein’s vision for consumerist-fantasy Tahiti, piled up into a bonfire-heap centrepiece for its sequel. His cast pace and prowl, chase and embrace one another in Sarah Fahie’s precise movement direction: touch both a weapon and its balm as a broken family tries to repair itself. 

This is immensely – often audibly – challenging music. Neill and Doyle take the brunt of it, the former turning Junior’s conflicted sexual urges and identity into something queasily touching. Pierce’s wide-eyed Dede skims lightly above the textures, apparently oblivious to the deeper emotional currents, a glint of light above the stave and at the narrative horizon. 

A Quiet Place may be Bernstein’s last word, but once the noise has died away, it’s Trouble in Tahiti you still hear. A towering central performance from Canadian mezzo Wallis Giunta as trapped housewife Dinah anchors an opera whose pastel formica surfaces have proved surprisingly durable. Forget the Great American Opera; might this throwaway gesture of a show not, in fact, be the perfect one? 

Until 24 October. rbo.org.uk