‘Ghost Opera’ Entertains on Many Levels

The stage is set with a stage floor-to-curtain top scrim about 4 feet across, and risers for the quintet--string quartet and pipa, the short-necked Chinese lute. Three transparent bowls of water, used for producing liquid sounds, are spotlighted around the stage. Lighting effects and ritualized movements by the five players abound.

Yet the Kronos Quartet’s staged production of Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera,” given in the Irvine Barclay Theatre, Tuesday night, is surprisingly ungimmicky.

Written for the Kronos--violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jenrenaud--and pipa virtuoso Wu Man in 1994, and later recorded by them (the ensemble played it at the L.A. County Museum of Art in 1995), “Ghost Opera” is a 35-minute work that lives up to its official description: “a cross-temporal, cross-cultural and cross-media dialogue that touches on the past, present, future and the eternal.” To the rapt audience in Irvine, it spoke engrossingly on all those levels.

As a visual and aural entertainment, it holds an observer engagingly. As a spiritual exploration, it melds--not merely juxtaposes--Eastern and Western musical styles naturally. And even at its most attenuated, it never bores.

Besides the quartet’s strings and the pipa, “Ghost Opera” calls for the sound of splashing water and bows drawn across cymbals; paper, folded and blown through, is used as a tone-making medium; the players sing and yelp lyrics from monks, Shakespeare and folk song and manipulate stones and metal.

The Kronos and Wu Man have polished and tightened all this to the point where all the parts flow from and into each other, and even the occasional yell seems inevitable. For once, one heard few coughs in the Irvine Barclay.

The first half of the evening, pre-”Ghost Opera,” achieved a similar polish. It began with an unhurried run-through of Terry Riley’s inexorable “G Song” (1981), and ended with five short pieces from four composers unlikely to share a set: Hildegard von Bingen, Harry Partch, the Byzantine-era Kassia (another cloistered female composer) and Alfred Schnittke.

What these pieces share, heard side by side, is directness of expression, beauteous sound-products and haunting musical poetry. One had to be touched by this inspired bringing together of disparate compositional forces.

In between Riley’s spiritual overture and Schnittke’s poignant “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief”--all on the Kronos’ recent CD “Early Music”--Bartok’s Third Quartet held the ear compellingly. However long this ensemble has played the work--probably through most of its 25-year history--it now belongs to them incontrovertibly. Behind the unremitting intensity and canny emotional timing is the players’ complete understanding and projection of its musical scenario.