Tag Archives: Dai Fujikura

Scottish Opera: The Great Wave

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Theatre Royal, Glasgow

There’s no denying the ambition behind The Great Wave, a substantial full-length opera by composer Dai Fujikura and librettist Harry Ross that aims to project the extraordinary biography of 18th/19th century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai as a universal embodiment of the creative spirit. At Thursday’s premiere of this undeniably bold co-production between Scottish Opera and Japanese concert agency KAJIMOTO (it travels to Tokyo after a mere four Scottish performances across Glasgow and Edinburgh) such dual ambition struggled to justify its two-hour presence in our lives.

Hokusai’s iconic Ukiyo-e printmaking and book illustrations effectively revolutionised the industrial scale commercialisation of art. He is best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, a dynamic man-against-nature, Persian blue image of fishermen battling a mountainous wave with Mount Fuji stoically set in the background. It later inspired Debussy’s La Mer, not to mention the popular Apple emoji for “wave”. Somehow, the image’s symbolic omnipresence in this production reflects more the opera’s resistance to momentum than any promise of compelling magnetism.

The Great Wave begins with Hokusai’s death, the lengthy silence surrounding his coffin broken by the devotional keening of his daughter Oi (soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong) and the release of his spirit musically scented by the ethereal breathiness of the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute. Episodes in his long life – he died approaching 90, was struck by lightning on two occasions and expected to live to 110 – are revisited in a sequence of flashbacks that attempt to substantiate his creative immortality. 

Some magical elements emerge in the process. By and large, Satoshi Miyagi’s stage direction is sharply expressive, stylised in a quasi-ritualistic sense, softened by genuinely compassionate interactions, if prone to weird bouts of silliness. Odd snatches of humour are underplayed or too compartmentalised to produce much more than a hesitant audience titter. 

Similarly Akiko Kitamura’s choreography makes effective use of the cast’s professional dancers and mechanically-synchronised chorus, but submits now and again to self-caricature. More consistent, and aligning persuasively with Miyagi’s figurative simplicity, are Junpei Kiz’s vivid set designs and their interaction with Sho Yamaguchi’s morphing video effects and Kayo Takahashi Deschene’s mono-toned costumes.

What disappoints repeatedly, though, is the impotency of Fujikura’s vocal writing and his struggle to sustain organic development: that sense of prolonged musical journey, of heightening lyrical tensions, of inevitably reaching a destination. That, in itself, may have accounted for some inconsistent performances on opening night. 

As Hokusai, Daisuke Ohyama struggled to project his lower register, but had no problem with the hysterical falsetto that animated a rather manically divergent scene about a “smelly fart”. After a shaky start, Lozano Rolong’s Oi grew in confidence. Tenors Shengzi Ren (doubling as Mr Tozaki and Hokusai’s publisher Yohachi) and Luvo Maranti (the artist’s grandson), along with Chloe Harris as Hokusai’s second wife Koto, provided the most sustained and memorable performances. Edward Hawkins (Toshiro) and countertenor Collin Shay (von Siebold) were relatively incidental, but needful presences nonetheless. 

The Chorus, engineered in a blunt reactive fashion, delivered a gutsy compulsive edge, purposefully motivated despite the occasional and repetitive banality of their bullet-point utterances. At one point, joined by children’s voices, an ecstatic leaning to Benjamin Britten informed one of The Great Wave’s most uplifting scenes.

But the winning key element of this new opera is surely to be found in the orchestra pit, where music director Stuart Stratford and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera issue a side to Fujikura’s creativeness that really does sing. His orchestral score harnesses a passion and narrative momentum absent from much of the vocal writing, presenting a captivating menagerie of detailed, magical imagery that rides atop a thrusting cinematic undercurrent. It’s just not quite enough to offset the weaknesses of substance and prolixity that surround it.

It’s worth mentioning, too, that Thursday’s opening performance was dedicated to the memory of Scottish Opera founder Sir Alexander Gibson, born 100 years ago this month. Who knows what he would have made of The Great Wave? At the very least he would have applauded the sincerity of the effort bravely undertaken by a company he loved.

Ken Walton

Further performances of The Great Wave are at the Theatre Royal Glasgow (14 February) and Edinburgh Festival Theatre (19 & 21 February)

(Photo credit: Mihaela Bodlovic)

Scottish Opera’s new season

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The new season unveiled by Scottish Opera marks a decade in post for Music Director Stuart Stratford, and it has been one of company stability and notable artistic successes. Before talking about what’s to come, he identified his own highlights of those ten years.

“I always feel there is still so much to do, but Puccini’s Il trittico was a highlight for the whole company. It was a major project for us. There are also the collaborations which produced Greek, Breaking the Waves and Ainadamar, which has gone to Detroit, Houston, the Met and Los Angeles but originated here.

“Then there are the community pieces, like Pagliacci in Paisley, Candide at Edington Street and Oedipus Rex at the Edinburgh Festival – those are the kind of projects we’re really interested in as a company.

“And there are the rare operas. It was great to have given the Scottish premiere of Daphne by Richard Strauss, and Scottish Opera should always be championing unusual pieces as well as the core repertoire.”

That said, the 2025/26 season, unveiled as the company opens a new production of The Merry Widow at Glasgow’s Theatre Royal, has just the one show that really ticks the boxes for innovation and adventurousness. Like this year’s Edinburgh Festival programme and the coming season from the RSNO, it has all the hallmarks of being signed off in straitened times.

The exception is the world premiere of The Great Wave, a new work by Japanese composer Dai Fujikura and Scots librettist Harry Ross, best known in his native land previously as the producer of the award-winning presence of the British Army at the Edinburgh Fringe – “a foil to the Edinburgh Military Tattoo” as The List magazine put it.

Fujikura’s previous successes include an operatic version of  the Stanislaw Lem novel Solaris, and The Dream of Armageddon, based on an H G Wells short story, both of which involved Ross.

The new piece is the story of Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai and his daughter, Oi, and is being co-produced with KAJIMOTO, who will present the work in Kyoto and Tokyo.

Says Stratford, who will conduct: “Fujikura’s music is quite eclectic, avant garde meets Japanese mimimalism, and in this piece there is a big role for the shakuhachi, a Japanese flute, which gives it  a really interesting sound-world.”

The other main house shows in the season are revivals: the Barbe and Doucet La boheme from 2017, which the pair will return to direct, with Hye-Youn Lee also returning as Mimi, and Sir Thomas Allen’s The Marriage of Figaro, back for another run but sung in English this time.

As with The Barber of Seville, Stratford believes the production will be reinvigorated by the change.

“There we saw a development in the performances and a renewed connection with audiences in the refreshed version. Boheme, on the other hand, I think loses some of its attraction if it’s not in Italian.”

Earlier next Spring, the Theatre Royal will also see a Saturday afternoon concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, repeated during the following week at Edinburgh Usher Hall, and Stratford says that is a taster of a new commitment.

“It was 2013 when we did The Flying Dutchman, so it is high time we tackled some Wagner, especially as the orchestra is playing as well as it has ever played – so you’ll see more in the coming years.”

As has become its custom in the past decade, the company starts its new season in Haddington at the Lammermuir Festival. This year that is a double bill, pairing comedies of infidelity, Walton’s The Bear and Ravel’s l’heure espangnole, which will be part of the festival’s commemoration of 150 years since the birth of the French composer. As has happened only more recently, the operas will also be seen later in both Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Although there is no staged community production this year, that work goes on, in primary schools as part of the Glasgow 850 celebrations, with the building of a children’s chorus that will feature in main stage shows, and with the establishment of an Edinburgh branch of the adult community chorus, mirroring the Glasgow one and following on from the work for the EIF Oedipus Rex.

Full details of the new season can be found at scottishopera.org.uk