Music One walked into Xi Shi, the first western-style opera commissioned by China’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, keenly aware of how much the Italian and Chinese lyric stage traditions share in escalating historical figures into grandiose dimensions. One walked out realising how differently their musical values have developed.
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| Wei Song (left) and Xu Xiaoying |
In bringing Xi Shi to the operatic stage, the NCPA turned to the Shanghai Opera House in assembling an all-Chinese production team. The order of the evening’s billing – director Cao Qijing, playwright Zou Jingzhi and composer Lei Lei – is a key to the opera’s problem.
The production quality was superb, with sets and costumes unfolding throughout the evening like an ancient scroll painting in full colour. English supertitles were first-rate. So too did the performers consistently grab the audience’s eyes and ears.
But holding them was a different matter and here the fault lay principally in the score, an eclectic mix of influences rooted in Puccini’s Turandot and streaming through Chinese film scores and classic Broadway – including a wooden-shoe dance, suggesting ancient Chinese culture as filtered through Riverdance. Moment by moment, the music was pleasant; it also had a fine vocal facility, highlighting character contrasts and consistently placing soprano Xu Xiaoying’s Xi Shi, tenor Wei Song’s King of Yue and baritone Yang Xiaoyong’s King of Wu in their best light. But too often it resorted to illustrating the story rather than driving it.
Opera can lack memorable melodies or dramatic thrust, but not both. The composer had little help from conductor Chen Zuohuang and even less from the libretto, which was written in the flowery, poetic language of Peking Opera, where even today characters tell more than they show. Even the synopsis describes the characters’ feelings more than mentioning what they do. 
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