Prepare for a Far Eastern surprise

In front of a painted screen, a singer and a drummer, both richly clad in silk, are engaged in a sort of three-way dialogue with each other and their rapt audience.

The singer switches between intensely dramatic narration and impassioned, heavily vibrato singing; her every nuance, gesticulation, expression - droll, knowing or tragic - is weighted. The drummer, under his stove-pipe hat, lets fly with intermittent yells of acknowledgement and encouragement , while his horizontal, barrel-shaped drum underpins mood and pace. A peremptory rap and the singer’s fan snaps open. Timing is everything - and in more than one way. These performances can last for five or six hours.

Welcome to pansori, an ancient Korean art that combines singing and storytelling. An epic folk opera with overtones of balladry, it makes formidable demands on its performers, the greatest of whom are sometimes compared to the Maria Callases of the western operatic world. Complete, classic pansori is rarely performed outside Korea, but this year’s Edinburgh International Festival audiences will have the rare chance to experience it for themselves.

The origins of pansori go back as far as the 14th century. Its name can be translated as "songs at a place of entertainment", but it is much more than a song recital. As the five classic examples being performed in Edinburgh - by five of Korea’s leading singers - will demonstrate, the drama is carried by a combination of narrative, dialogue and singing, switching from knowing asides and vituperative gossip to the far-eastern equivalent of a grand-operatic aria.

The singer’s expressions and gestures play a vital part. Recounting popular epics of ill-starred romances, heroic battles or the vagaries of gods and demons is challenging enough, but to do it for six hours at a time is a considerable feat of stamina and memory.

It is also, you might think, a daunting prospect for audiences. Someone who can comment from first-hand experience is Brian McMaster; last year he received a phone call from Josphine Markovits, of the Festival d’Automne a Paris, urging him to catch a flight to France as soon as he could - she had something wonderful to show him.

Intrigued, McMaster managed to book a flight, then phoned back for more details. On being told that what he was about to hear was five and a half hours long, involving one singer and a percussionist and all in Korean, he was less than impressed. "I took a very deep swallow," he recalls, "and called her something unprintable."

But, since he had already booked the flight, he went anyway. "And I was absolutely bowled over," he says. "The theatre was packed - a smallish Paris place but still several hundred people. I looked at my watch once in five and a half hours . I was engrossed."

What was it about the performance that convinced him, virtually on the spot, that this was something he must bring to Edinburgh? It is, he concedes, an acquired taste: "The first few minutes you’re adjusting yourself to something that is so totally different, but you just get sucked into it. "

However Edinburgh audiences react, they will be experiencing the very best, as the visiting pansori singers will include performers of such calibre as Ahn Suk-Sun, whose name in Korean means prima donna and who has recorded 20 CDs containing five complete pansori repertoires. Also coming is Kim Il-Goo, who will perform Jeokbyeok-ga - "the Song of the Red Cliff", the pansori for which he has become famous and which has been described as the oriental equivalent of the Iliad.

It goes without saying that the projected subtitles, English versions of which are currently being prepared for the Edinburgh performances, are essential in enabling the westerner to stay with a pansori. "It is a narrative; you do very much need to follow the words," says McMaster.

In Paris, not one person left at the interval and he obviously hopes audiences in Edinburgh’s Reid Concert Hall will be similarly engrossed.

If Markovits’s experience with Paris audiences is anything to go by, McMaster has nothing to worry about. "We had people who came every night and sat there for every different story," she recalls of last year, when the Festival d’Automne mounted the first such recital outside Korea. "People are still talking about it. I don’t think we in the west have anything like pansori, anywhere. It’s the most incredible combination of opera and storytelling. The singers - the kwandae - seem to have incredible training in vocal techniques. There is, of course, a lot of ornamentation, but the voice is very characteristic to pansori and I can’t think of an equivalent anywhere else in Asia; the voice is coming from so many different parts of the body, complete breathing and complete control."

There is a legend, she adds, that some great pansori singers were made to train near a waterfall in the mountains, and their singing had to compete with the roar of the waterfall. Similar tales, of course, abound about western singers practising with the taps running, but the waterfall, we agree, sounds much more romantic.

Markovits stresses the importance of what she calls "the triangular relationship between the singer, the gosu (drummer) and audience. "The percussionist, in a way, controls how the performance develops, giving the beat, and he is the one who punctuates the story and encourages the singer; then there is a degree of audience participation too, so the key to the success of this triangular relationship - at least outside Korea - is how we work the subtitles."

Edinburgh will be employing the same method that was developed for the Paris performances, with subtitles projected above the stage. The projectionist will be completely acquainted with the pansori and working closely with the singers, allowing for any pauses or elaborations. "We had a team of French and Koreans working on subtitles for six to eight weeks," recalls Markovits. "And we’re making sure the French subtitles will be properly adapted to English, because we have to convey the wit, the fun, the poetic and dramatic elements - also the politics, because pansori was used for satire at a time when political protest wasn’t allowed. The audience would know very well what it was all about."

As McMaster found, once you are engrossed in the story, time can pass surprisingly quickly. Also, says Markovits, "they can sometimes get so funny; it is so strong, and constantly changing in vocal techniques, and the story just takes you."

McMaster agrees: "Some of it was very funny - lavatorial humour."

Pansori remains highly popular in South Korea, where, according to Markovits, the top singers are regarded as national treasures and the five classic stories are widely known across the generations and still provide a source of inspiration for writers of plays, operettas, films and even comics. "The vocal and musical style is regarded as the expression of Korean soul," she says, although, like other art forms in other cultures, modern audiences may have a shorter attention span: "I have seen outdoor sessions in front of large audiences, the singers using microphones. There are pansori concerts often in big cities but seldom with the complete stories - just perhaps 30-minute excerpts. This is why our programme, and the Edinburgh programme, are so important - officials in Seoul were quite astonished when I came up with this project."

She has visited some pansori classes in Seoul, which were taken by masters of the art: "I’ve heard kids, about 12 years old, singing it, and they were absolutely amazing."

Not all Koreans are devotees, however, at least not in North Korea, where pansori appears to be defunct, largely due to the antipathy of the late Kim Il-Sung, who regarded the folk art as a suspect incongruity in modern times - although as far as musical criticism goes, his criteria seem somewhat limited: "Pansori can neither excite the people nor spur them into a fighting mood," the North Korean leader lamented back in the 1960s. "Koreans innately have beautiful voices, but it is unpleasant to hear pretty girls squeak while chanting pansori."

In the south, however, Korea’s ancient folk opera still attracts a devoted following. One of the exponents visiting Edinburgh, Ann Suk-Sun, has her own television programme. Like any other traditional art form, however, to avoid becoming moribund, pansori continues to develop. Last year saw Korean musician Lee Yong-su moved to compose a pansori commemorating the catastrophic events of 11 September. And one leading singer, Markovits says, has adapted a storyline taken, not from the annals of Korean folklore, but from a popular video game.

The Edinburgh International Festival pansori series will be in the Reid Concert hall, 13-17 August.