Edinburgh International Festival opera review: Book of Mountains and Seas

The Lyceum, until 16 August

The big question behind composer Huang Ruo’s patience-testing, woefully ill-conceived Book of Mountains and Seas was: why?

When there are so many composers doing pioneering, challenging, witty, provocative things with opera, what box did this particular work tick, or what thematic slot did it fill, to allow it to become the International Festival’s second and final staged opera for 2025? There was, frankly, little about it that was convincing.

Scoring the work for chamber choir and two percussionists is unusual but intriguing – it’s less persuasive, though, when the singers of Ars Nova Copenhagen give a disappointingly approximate account, blurring over Ruo’s intricate vocal decorations and sliding apart from each other in tuning. When Ruo’s sparse, austere choral textures needed confident, committed delivery, what they got sounded unconvincing and unconvinced.

Likewise, director Basil Twist’s puppetry amounted to little more than rippling sheets for the sea and Chinese lanterns (what else?) on poles representing the ten suns of the work’s ancient Chinese creation myths. Even the gigantic human figure that coalesced towards the work’s conclusion felt ungainly in its limited movements.

The subject matter behind the work offers fascinating insights into a little-known culture and history, though few of the contemporary environmental parallels suggested in the programme book. But what this overlong, poorly executed work is doing as part of the curated International Festival is anyone’s guess.

David Kettle

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