Huang Ruo and Basil Twist's Book of Mountains and Seas is a meditative, 80-minute stagework featuring twelve vocalists, carried by a feeling of suspension for generous stretches. Two percussionists play a key role in the marking of time and, more importantly, texture and mood. A commission by Paul Hillier for the ensemble Ars Nova Copenhagen, the piece started taking shape as devised vocal theatre, with the singers as puppeteers generating some of the physical motion and visual fingerprint of the storytelling themselves. Conceptually interesting but impractical, given the complexity of Huang Ruo's music, a powerful synergy between all of the elements remains in the finished work, which premiered in 2021 and is now on tour, reaching Los Angeles.
Master puppeteer Twist's main physical materials include expanses of silk, Chinese globe lanterns and what appear to be sections of gnarled driftwood, enhanced by Ayumu “Poe” Saugusa's nuanced, magical lighting designs. Combining original text with freely-invented language (not suited for subtitles), and incorporating some Chinese extended vocal techniques, the storyline anchors itself to ancient creation myths through epigrammatic texts, projected in English and Chinese characters. The story resonates richly and deeply in the present, if one is willing to yield to the work's overall rhythm and minimalist means, and their poetic, transformational potential.
In the first of four scenes, the Legend of Pangu relates the birth of the world from an egg, and also from chaos as symbolized graphically in the form of a single line. Ars Nova Copenhagen, a high-calibre ensemble, are also a collection of individually distinctive voices, and it is this dimension which lends human interest and identity to the thin, spun-out ribbon of lyrical tone launching the work. Simultaneously, prototypical lantern-eyeballs stream silks into rivers, and driftwood fragments form arches or mountain peaks. Silks of sharply contrasting size animate the stage in the second scene. A small kite-like puppet embodies the princess Nǚ Wa, virtuosically manoeuvred over a billowing ocean, unlocking dynamism as well as a tensional dialogue. Male voices undulate fluidly while solo female voices pierce the texture. At peak levels of animation, with dappled lighting, the picture evolves into something more fluidly immersive, with driftwood links forming a serpent-like sea dragon.
The visually stunning and dream-like third scene rolls out the legend of Ten Suns with the lantern orbs and singers in an expanding dance, variably and exquisitely lit. Musically-reinforced intimation of the world's overheating pushes the full slate of puppeteers off the stage, in front of the audience, with the black caps of the lanterns rotated to become the pupils of five pleading pairs of eyes staring out into the audience. The god of archery uses a driftwood bow to shoot all but one of the suns – a glorious death yielding a celestial star-studded sky. The visceral climax and the formation of the giant Kuā Fù begins the fourth scene slowly, almost ritualistically, with the addition of a head crowning the familiar limbs. Once the form begins to pursue the remaining sun, all of the performing forces must act in tight concert (led by conductor Miles Lallement, placed out of view in a balcony), with the percussionists in particular engaging a broad range of timbres, attacks and rhythmic patterns to convey urgency and alarm simultaneously. Exhausting the rivers, Kuā Fù's greed proves futile, fatally so, yielding once again an image and sound world saturated with beauty, and warm harmony on this second occasion, from a pivotal death. Showered in peach blossom petals, the individual singers blend into a cluster centre stage, implying perhaps some kind of survival, or perhaps a surreal glimpse of the afterlife, in any case a blissful release from an unsustainable quest.
Reflecting on the experience as a whole, Book of Mountains and Seas made me think about the prominent role projected texts have come to play in opera production, of well-known and new repertoire. Many depend on their presence and meaning to feel connected to what is happening musically and scenically. Book of Mountains and Seas doesn't dance that dance continuously, reveling instead in imaginatively suggestive imagery and sound worlds. It invites you into a more elemental shared space. In very select ways, Book of Mountains and Seas tugged at my memories of experiencing Tan Dun's Marco Polo at the Munich Biennale nearly 30 years ago – a pivotal moment in my understanding of what opera could be. I am grateful to add Book of Mountains and Seas to a repertoire of experiences that has continued to gain considerable richness ever since.
