Book of Mountains and Seas
The Lyceum, Edinburgh - 15/08/25
Ars Nova Copenhagen, Michael Murphy and John Ostrowski (percussion), Miles Lallemant (conductor, music director), Beth Morrison Projects (production, puppeteers)
Twelve singers, six puppeteers, two percussionists, yards of silk, glowing lanterns and other lighting and staging effects brought to life Chinese-American composer and librettist Huang Ruo’s ambitious 75 minute ‘vocal theatre’ work, Book of Mountains and Seas, for its UK and Scottish premiere at the Lyceum last night.
Well received across the world since its world premiere at the Royal Danish Opera House in 2021, this production showcases the accomplished Ars Nova Copenhagen. It largely eschews conventional narrative and operatic form, drawing upon a compilation of ancient Chinese myths summarised in modern English and Chinese across four impressionistic scenes. The whole is deeply culturally rooted but also echoes universal themes of planetary variance, creation, the interplay of the natural and human environment, and the relationship between past, present and future.
Stylistically, the vocal score and performance draws on ideas from Jingju (‘opera of the capital’ or Beijing/Peking opera), Sichuan opera and Kunqu opera. These are fused with western operatic techniques, along with elements of early polyphony and contemporary minimalism. The work starts slowly, with intimations of the likes of Philip Glass and John Tavener alongside a broadly Chinese aesthetic.
Gradually, the music builds to a series of percussively inflected climaxes and recapitulations, before reaching a strong denouement and calmer conclusion. Rhythm is vital here: drums, cymbals, Tibetan finger cymbals, waterphone and found objects. But this is only part of the picture. Woven into the overall texture of Book of Mountains and Seas is the visual flow of some striking imagery and abstract, large-scale puppetry.
The theatrical space is dark. The singers’ faces are illuminated in orange and red throughout, only emerging a little from the void towards the end. The celestial lanterns are complemented by silk sheets and flags conveying the elemental forces of wind and rippling water. The mythical world that forms the foundation of this work links to contemporary concerns such as climate change.
This is a connection that Huang Ruo has been explicit about. But the strength of his innovative (yet also traditional) slice of music theatre is that it evokes rather than declaims or preaches. The overall impact is hypnotic. Time is suspended. So are many of our assumptions about how aural art asserts itself, develops and proceeds.
At the Lyceum the libretto was provided in English and Chinese surtitles. But Huang Ruo, whose work spans and embraces both classical vernacular forms, has also populated the soundscape with an abstract, invented, universal ‘language’. In this way, the scope of Book of Mountains and Seas extends way beyond the hour and quarter it occupies chronologically. It is both powerfully global and enticingly intimate.
Those who like their music to be busy and colourful will probably struggle with the style and deliberately limited timbral, textural and harmonic devices which shape its unusual operatic approach. In an over-stimulated, neurotic cultural moment, art like this requires patience, stillness and attention. That is a worthy endeavour, no matter whether this particular music reaches deep inside us or not.
The first of three performances, through to 16th August.
