The Lady from the Sea – Edinburgh festival review

Five: 15 was Scottish Opera's new-music project, bringing together homegrown composers and writers to create short theatre pieces. The scheme ran for three seasons; the company regarded it as such a huge success that out of it comes a short season of more ambitious new work that has found its way into the closing week of this year's Edinburgh international festival.

In fact, only two of the four composers involved in this latest venture were part of the Five: 15 series. One of those was Craig Armstrong, and his 65-minute opera – based upon Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea, with a libretto by Zoë Strachan – is the most substantial of the four. The text boils Ibsen's drama down to its essence, though retaining a few unnecessary loose ends and redundant characters, but the music never really answers the implicit question of why it has been turned into an opera in the first place.

Armstrong's score has a Philip Glass-like neutrality about it. The orchestral writing chugs along, simply wandering off in a slightly different direction when a scene changes or a new character enters, and just occasionally working itself up to a contrived climax; the disconnect with the rather leaden, lifeless vocal lines is almost complete. Only the central characters, Ellida, the lady from the sea herself, and her husband Wangel are anywhere close to being properly defined; even the Stranger, who may or may not be a ghost and triggers the crisis in the Wangels' marriage, is a mere cipher.

But Claire Booth as Ellida and Mark Milhofer as her husband do breathe some life into their confrontations, and Harry Fehr's production, in Yannis Thavoris's elegant period designs, looks handsome, making neat uses of video projections of a dark, roiling sea. It just all never engages in the way that any opera based on such a source should.