The Lady from the Sea

With its powerful story of repressed passions and its strong central heroine, it’s a wonder that more composers haven’t turned to Ibsen’s play The Lady from the Sea as the basis for opera. Scottish composer Craig Armstrong, best known for stage and film scores including Moulin Rouge! and Romeo + Juliet, has long been fascinated by the work. So it seemed like a natural choice of material when he was approached by Scottish Opera to create a large-scale work for them, following success in the company’s smaller-scale Five:15 project, when he produced a short chamber opera about Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo with author Ian Rankin. His new opera tells of Ellida, trapped in a loveless marriage with the well-meaning Dr Wangel and forced to choose between stultifying security and terrifying freedom with a former lover. Armstrong has constructed his piece in 28 short movements, each accompanying a scene or exchange with evocative and luminously scored music.

The problem is that the music seems just that – an accompaniment, rather than an embodiment of or commentary on the narrative. His gently pulsing soundscapes, all rippling, Glass-like arpeggios and portentous bass notes, seem like simply a soundtrack to the text, given in a pared-down version by writer Zoë Strachan, rather than bonding with the words and plot in an inseparable whole. And instead of conveying the characters’ emotions or thoughts, his vocal lines seem rather anonymous: musical stresses sometimes fall on wrong words, leading the listener down semantic cul-de-sacs, and lines are repeated seemingly arbitrarily rather than for dramatic necessity.

Nevertheless, it’s an arresting production. Director Harry Fehr brings a brittle clarity to the rather dense tale of interweaving lives with energy and a speedy pace, and designer Yannis Thavoris’s beautiful sets, strikingly lit, have an appropriately Scandinavian elegance and simplicity. Most memorable are Finn Ross’s highly effective video projections, which slowly take over the set as the symbolically turbulent sea invades Ellida’s cosy life.

Claire Booth is magnificently sensual as the tormented Ellida, mixing fragility and neediness with a steely core of determination, and her limpid soprano is touching in its directness. Mark Milhofer is strong as Wangel, but the other parts are rather under-written – Benedict Nelson has a fine voice as Ellida’s former lover who comes to reclaim her, but his character is no more than sketched in, and his music does little to help. There’s a lot that’s good in the work, but it falls rather short of being operatic in the truest sense.