The music of this two-part work is by Kaija Saariaho, to a libretto based on Ezra Pound’s adaptations of Japanese Noh plays. The direction is by Peter Sellars, who collaborated on the piece from the outset. The last time I was in the presence of a Noh-derived Western opera was at the American premiere of Benjamin Britten’s Curlew River in the Venetian Courtyard at Caramoor in 1966, a production that starred the longtime Met character tenor Andrea Velis as the Madwoman, with a cast of New York City Opera regulars. I reviewed both work and production favorably in Musical America, and though I haven’t encountered it in live performance since, I rate Curlew a small masterpiece. There are some similarities between the Britten and the first of the two Saariaho operas, called Tsunemasa (Always Strong). Both involve a journey to a sacred spot to pay honor to a dead and/or missing person (a slain warrior in Only the Sound, a kidnapped son in Curlew), and in both, surcease is brought to the living visitor by the appearance of the departed’s spirit. Both pieces are scored for small instrumental ensembles that are European in composition, but which evoke Japanese timbral and harmonic colorings. In both, the spirit is represented by a male singing in some form of head voice (a boy treble in the Britten, an adult falsettist in the Saariaho). In Curlew, the story is transported to medieval Britain and is Christianized, whereas Only the Sound stays in its country and religion of origin.

The physical production of Tsunemasa (Julie Mehretu, set; Robby Duiveman; costumes; James F. Ingalls, lights) consisted of a large stretched sheet and the dead warrior’s sarcophagus. The sheet changed color and composition, and when it was in plain white mode and backlit, the warrior’s spirit, in the person of Philippe Jaroussky, would sneak behind it and mime spooky silhouette effects of the sort we used to create at our annual day-camp shows in pre-adolescent years. The enactors’ behavior was of the grave, ritualistic, mimetic sort, depicting first the visitor’s prayer and offering, and then his bonding with the departed’s spirit, including a tender kiss and some cheek-to-cheek facetime, isolated by lighting. There was a sound design by Christophe Lebreton that seamlessly slid the voices in and out of other-worldly electronic enhancements; an SATB vocal quartet in the pit was treated in like manner, and from time to time threw in worshipful gestures of their own.

Since the Met’s production of Saariaho’s L’Amour du Loin fell into my self-declared season of sabbatical from the company’s New Opera of the Year, I didn’t see it. I do possess a CD of excerpts from that score, and so had some idea of how she’d set that story. Tsunemasa was quite different. I felt covered from head to toe with tiny insectoid beings jabbing me with toothpicks and picking at myriad scabs, and I began to obsess over the fact that I’d given over thirty-eight-and-one-half dollars (a price that seemed reasonable before the fact) and the heart of an evening to what seemed to me a pseudo-spiritual, mock-Asian exercise whose deathly, sickly, fetishistic feel had nothing to do with any true contemplation of mortality or reverence for those passed from us. And why aren’t the cultural appropriation vigilantes all over this one?