Scott Cantrell

SAN FRANCISCO – What are we to make of The Bonesetter's Daughter, the opera?

Commissioned and premiered by San Francisco Opera, it's based on the best-selling semiautobiographical novel by Bay Area celebrity Amy Tan, who also crafted the libretto. It's about complex relationships among three generations of women blending from China to America, about the presence of the past and the past-ness of the present.

And, at the War Memorial Opera House, it's been given a production overloaded with visual and sonic effects. Acrobats fly through the air, projections shift through fire and water, and an orchestration including braying Chinese shawms (oboe-like woodwinds) rustles and flickers as restlessly as confetti.

There are also Texas connections. Composer Stewart Wallace, now of New York, was born in Philadelphia but raised in Texas and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin. The opera is SFO's second major premiere since David Gockley became general director, in 2006, after 33 years with Houston Grand Opera. HGO and SFO were co-commissioners of Mr. Wallace's 1995 opera, Harvey Milk.

In The Bonesetter's Daughter the American-born and thoroughly Americanized Ruth Young Kamen has married into a Jewish family. But she tries, awkwardly, to bridge the cultural gap with her Chinese-born mother LuLing Liu Young. The whole opera is haunted by the floating, gliding spirit of LuLing's mother, known as Precious Auntie.

As the opera progresses, we learn more about LuLing's troubled history. She's the product of a rape and just barely escaped being impregnated by her father, a scumbag coffin-maker in a Chinese village ironically named Immortal Heart.

She's a manipulative depressive who has repeatedly threatened suicide. But she's also the most fully drawn character in the opera, a complex figure at once off-putting and strangely sympathetic.

It must be a rare parent-child relationship that isn't troubled by ambivalence. And the opera's final scene, about forgiveness between Ruth and LuLing, will touch anyone who has watched a parent's dementia-clouded demise.

That last scene, wrapped in glowing clouds of strings, is also interminable, the final evidence of the opera's general dramatic – and musical – muddle.

The multiple flashbacks work better onstage than they look in print. But they keep us as suspended in midair as Precious Auntie is much of the time.

And Mr. Wallace has the orchestra burbling, shimmering, occasionally braying and booming, to no particular dramatic arc and not a lot of emotional specificity. I pity singers having to pull pitches out of these sonic kaleidoscopes, but if the vocal lines aren't what you could call tuneful, they are at least largely fluent. Precious Auntie also makes much of the slides and nasal tones typical of traditional Chinese opera.

The singers in the San Francisco production are champs. Mezzo Zheng Cao is warmly lyrical as Ruth, Ning Liang denser-toned, with awesome chest voice, as LuLing. Both physically and vocally, Qian Yi exudes haunting Alice-in-Wonderland weirdness as Precious Auntie. Other standouts are Hao Jiang Tian as Chang the Coffin-maker, James Maddalena as Art Kamen and Wu Tong as a chef and Taoist priest.

Director-choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng clarifies the characters but clutters the stage with too much business. The production makes much of Leigh Haas' projections, with relatively spare props by Walt Spangler, lit by Scott Zielinski. Apt and sometimes fantastic costumes are by fashion designer Han Feng. At least in Tuesday's penultimate performance, conductor Steven Sloane seemed in full control of the musical complexities.Plan your life

The Bonesetter's Daughter repeats at 8 p.m. today at War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. $15 to $290. 415-864-3330, www.sfopera.org.

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