Arts:Blog

Opera Review: The Great Wave ***

Anna Burnside reviews a production that ‘looks astounding’ but lacks ‘any sense of jeopardy’.

In this ambitious co-production with Japanese management company KAJIMOTO, Scottish Opera takes brand extension to places it has never been before.

Hokusai’s The Great Wave, as seen on fridge magnets, tote bags and student walls, is now a five-act opera, composed by Dai Fujikura with a libretto by Harry Ross.

The artist’s life is presented in fragmented reverse, starting with his funeral and then dotting between his studio, his youth and his frail old age. Of course, the dream sequence, where he conceived his most famous work, is there too.

It looks astounding. Director Satoshi Miyagi leads a Japanese design team, and the costumes and sets use Hokusai’s images, traditional materials and fashion tropes to create a luscious and unmistakably Japanese world.

There are dancers, children, a chorus…visually there is a lot going on. What is missing is any sense of jeopardy. Very little is at stake here. Hokusai’s wish, in his old age, is that he could live 10 more years. If his daughter Oi, an artist in her own right, is salty about having to make the old man’s yuzu tea, we hear nothing of it.

It’s hard to fault the music. Baritone Daisuke Ohyama, as Hokusai, is outsung by Oi, the high soprano Julieth Lozano Rolong. The orchestra of Scottish Opera, conducted with customary vigour by Stuart Stratford, is augmented by Shozan Hasegawa playing the shakuhachi.

This looks a bit like a giant recorder. Thankfully, the similarity ends there and it adds a fluttery, haunting top line to poignant moments.

There are plenty of those. All that’s lacking is the drama.

Scottish Opera’s production of The Great Wave has completed its run at Theatre Royal in Glasgow. It is at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh on the 19^th and 21^st of February 2026. For further details, go to the production’s website.

Photo by Mihaela Bodlovic.