THE HANGOVER REPORT – Huang Ruo’s BOOK OF MOUNTAIN & SEAS quietly mesmerizes, thanks largely to master puppeteer Basil Twist’s distilled artistry

A scene from Basil Twist’s staging of “Book of Mountains & Seas” by Huang Ruo at St. Ann’s Warehouse (photo by Teddy Wolff).

This past week, composer and librettist Huang Ruo’s new opera Book of Mountains & Seas played to pack houses at St. Ann’s Warehouse (the production played its final performance yesterday). The piece was supposed to have been one of the centerpieces of this year’s Prototype Festival, which was unfortunately cancelled due to the outbreak of the Omicron variant. Thankfully, presenters St. Ann’s Warehouse and Beth Morrison Projects (in association with Prototype and Trinity Church of Wall Street) have nonetheless proceeded with a weeklong run of the opera at the hip Brooklyn performing arts venue.

The opera is comprised of five ancient Chinese myths charting the creation of the world and its early days of evolution. In addition to taking these fanciful myths literally, one can also view them as timeless, contemplative commentaries on our fragile relationship with the world and nature. Ruo’s minimalist and repetitious chanting calls to mind Philip Glass’s distinctive choral writing for his operas Akhnaten and Satyagraha, which similarly draws in audiences with their insistent and mesmerizing sonic quality. However, unlike Glass’s aforementioned “portrait” operas, only occasionally does the musical pulse of Ruo’s opera rise above the quietly rhapsodic. The choral work comes courtesy of the chorus of Ars Nova Copenhagen, whose committed performance captivated with its discipline and rhythmic sensitivity.

The opera features the indispensable and genius contributions of Basil Twist (Symphonie Fantastique, Arias with a Twist), who has directed and designed the production with an auteur’s eye. For Book of Mountains & Seas, the master puppeteer has distilled his singular artistry to its bare essentials, imbuing the cosmic and mythical tales with a deceptively simple, elemental visual vocabulary. Thanks to the ninja-like work of a small team of puppeteers, the staging’s steady parade of striking and poetically suggestive stage pictures unfold seamlessly, uncannily synchronizing with the graceful progression of Ruo’s transfixing score, as well as the overarching notion of nature’s ambivalent and glacial cyclicality.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS
Opera
1 hour, 20 minutes (without an intermission)
St. Ann’s Warehouse / Beth Morrison Projects
Closed

Categories: Music, Opera, Other Music

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