Thomas Young    Polo
Laura Tucker    Marco
Susan Botti     Water
Don-Jian Gong   Kublai Khan
Lin Qiang Xu    Rustichello/Li Po
Stephen Bryant  Dante/Shakespeare
Emily Golden    Scheherezada/Mahler/Queen

Tan Dun         Conductor

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama Chamber Chorus

Paul Griffiths' novel, Myself and Marco Polo, was published in 1989, well
before Umberto Eco's The island of the day before, but Griffiths' and Tan
Dun's opera based on it belongs in the same sort of literary space --
utterly self-aware of the narrative process and modes of signification, and
more than somewhat chilly. Dun's and Sellars' Peony Pavilion, which
interweaves renaissance and far eastern musical and dramatic elements in a
similar way, by contrast had a certain human warmth by virtue of being a
greatly elaborated dirty joke, and characters who are recognizably human.

In Marco Polo, the action is the older Polo's telling his story to
Rusichello in prison. The musical styles of the journey (Venetian, Indian,
Tibetan, Peking opera) are genuine, but the whole journey is the imagining
of a rootless Venetian who does not even know Venice. It is interrupted by
Rustichello, and eventually by the weight of its own mendacity. Polo
doesn't know about the Great Wall, which more or less falls on his head,
until Li Po, Mahler and Shakespeare all appear to assert the value of
dreams and put back the kingdom of Kublai Kahn, which embodies a
monolithic, centralized world order. The young Marco breaks through the
Wall, out of the kingdom and presumably on to further imagined adventures,
as the rest of the performers acknowledge "an eye", the fixed point of view
of the subject, I. (I wonder if Griffith was thinking of Pink Floyd with
the wall?)

The big idea itself is interesting. Polo is in prison in Genoa, where
Columbus first started, and there is an obvious interplay between his
imaginary journey eastwards, where everything is always already imagined,
and Columbus' journey westwards to a world where imagination can run riot
and become reality. (He didn't know where he landed, but he definitely got
there.) Tan Dun's journey from Hunan round the back, as it were, to become
an American composer, perhaps completes the circle, or starts a new one,
suggesting that we're all imagining and remaking each other's cultures.
(Pacific Overtures?)

There is a certain amount of charm in Marco Polo. The range of instruments
is interesting in itself, especially the pipa and sitar, both of which are
wonderful to watch being played. The orchestral textures are a lot less
bland than the ghastly 1997 Symphony, and the singer's performance of the
difficult vocal techniques is pretty impressive. On the thematic side,
having Dante as Marco's guide though Venice (Pinocchio in Venice?) and into
the east is good idea. And there is a very amusing paws' length cat fight
between Water, the allegorical lover of the sailor-explorer Marco Polo, and
Scheherezada, who tries to keep him in the desert.

But an ideas-led opera is, if not a contradiction in terms, at least a
problem. This concert performance didn't have the benefit even of visual or
spatial organization (except for Kublai Khan moving closer to the platform
as Polo's narrative approaches the forbidden city). And, except for a few
funnies like the cat-fight, there isn't much interraction between the
characters, who are essentially constructing conflicting worlds though
narrative and pure language (there are substantial fragments in Chinese and
other languages). The performers, however, did a pretty good job of getting
the ideas over, and I could imagine a successful staging.

East is west, as Dr Donne more or less said.