A half-hour spent with Tan Dun’s Ghost Opera brings us face-to-face with the past, the present and ‘forever’ by employing, respectively, Bach and Shakespeare, a string quartet plus pipa (a pear-shaped, fretted lute) and an ensemble of water, stones, metal and paper. Wu Man plays pipa and doubles with vocals, bowed gong, tam-tam, Tibetan bells and paper. Kronos double their usual role with vocalizing, bowing a gong (watch those fillings!) and working a filled water bowl. Water is in fact the first thing we hear. Thereafter, three members of Kronos play a tender transcription of part of the Fourth Prelude from the First Book of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier – a leitmotiv that assumes especial poignancy in the third movement, or Third Act (there are five acts in all), where it converges with a Chinese folk-song to beautiful effect. The Fourth Act, “Metal and Stone”, a vivid study in aural perspectives and a hive of invention (some of it syncopated), transforms into the last act via a prominent gong stroke. Dun’s ethereal finale introduces a little girl’s lament for her lost parents and witnesses the gradual break-up of the Bach Prelude.
Ghost Opera was composed in 1994 and grew from an ancient tradition, where being rewarded after death is taken as read and everyone enters into dialogue with time. The libretto merges Shakespeare (“We are such stuff as dreams are made on...”), folk-song and the singing of monks, but Dun’s real mastery lies in the way he juxtaposes his ideas, delicately, dramatically, and alternating tactile sounds with the glow of Bach or the simplicity of folk-song. Some of the string writing echoes Chinese popular music (both in its compositional style and the way it is realized by Kronos), but it would be difficult to separate any one component of what is in effect a compact montage-cum-music-drama. It certainly says much for Kronos that they enter the spirit so convincingly (their vocal exclamations sound decidedly local), and the excellent recording does their efforts full justice.
Not one for every day of the week, perhaps, but an elevated form of ‘fusion’ that reaffirms the creative good sense of merging East with West.'