Take six stories, six librettists, an enormous cast including children and set it all to music. Stir vigorously. Add a flock of small birds, flapping, dancing and singing in search of their breeding ground. With an interlocking narrative crisscrossing history, from the pilgrim fathers to Bollywood, Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and Indian doctors in the NHS of the 1960s, the African Caribbean slave trade in 18th-century Bristol, a new oil pipeline in rural Canada, English lessons for refugees and, for good measure, a space rocket, Welsh National Opera’s Migrations could have been an unholy mess. At its world premiere at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff, on Wednesday, it was anything but.
Whether because the music, expertly played by the WNO Orchestra, was in the hands of one versatile composer, Will Todd, or because the director (also one of the librettists), David Pountney, evidently works best when perched blindfold on a precipice, this immense enterprise somehow hung together. Conspicuously, the large cast and various choruses, conducted by Matthew Kofi Waldren, believed in the enterprise and sang their hearts out. The evening zipped along, closer to musical theatre than opera, if you care about such distinctions, with some great choruses, ballads, arias, ensembles, Indian sitar and tabla, African-style drumming and baroque-inspired harpsichord. Not your thing? Go and be captivated. The catchy showpiece chorus This Is the Life has a tune you go home whistling.
Yes, it was episodic, some aspects of the stories lost in the melange, others heavy-handed or conversely too slim. But the spirit of communal enterprise, formidably well-rehearsed, carried the day. In Loren Elstein’s designs, the stage managed to accommodate the many strands without confusion. With multiple teams for each show, it is impossible to do justice to all. Some singers appeared in more than one story: Tom Randle, Brittany Olivia Logan and Aubrey Allicock stood out. Natasha Agarwal, soprano and award-winning dancer, mesmerised as an Indian doctor. Trained by chorus master David Doidge, the joint forces of WNO Chorus, Renewal Choir (a gospel-based choir from Bristol) and an enchanting children’s choir shone, all having learned their words to perfection. Since Homo erectus, migration has been an unavoidable aspect of the human condition. We still do not understood it in all its complexity. WNO has made a joyous attempt.
In its final weekend, the 2022 Aldeburgh festival pulled off its own multi-coup with four concerts and 20 premieres in honour of Oliver Knussen (1952-2018), composer, conductor, mentor, who would have been 70 last month. (Names from international musical life of the past half century illuminated the programmes, from Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze and Alexander Goehr to Julian Anderson, George Benjamin, Charlotte Bray, Tansy Davies and Colin Matthews.) Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Song for Big Owl – one of several pieces for solo cello, all heroically played by Anssi Karttunen – was a lament for his close friend. In contrasting mood, Augusta Read Thomas’s Riddle caught Knussen’s free-spirited wit. So, too, did Zoë Martlew’s O-lude, a mini-drama featuring his trademark can of Diet Coke, baton and taped recording of his voice in a rehearsal with another composer recently departed, Harrison Birtwistle. (For this feast of tiny chamber works, Karttunen was joined by top colleagues: soprano Claire Booth, violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen, pianists Christopher Glynn and Huw Watkins, and Rosalind Ventris, viola.
The highlight was Knussen’s own Cleveland Pictures for large orchestra (2003-9). He was a perfectionist; completion proved elusive. This work was unfinished, but sufficiently intact for a world premiere performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Ryan Wigglesworth. Each of the seven movements is a response to a work in the Cleveland Museum of Art, opening with Rodin and closing with Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Parliament, this last ending midair – and incomplete – with an impetuous whip-crack and rattle of maracas. Heard alongside Knussen’s Horn Concerto (1994), with the BBCSO’s principal horn, Martin Owen, as excellent soloist, Cleveland Pictures hinted at an expansive new sound world for a composer usually celebrated for the intimacy of his music. (The BBCSO’s account of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition – in the glittering version by Ravel, a composer adored by Knussen – was one to remember: mighty, ferocious and virtuosic. The finale, usually called in English The Great Gate of Kyiv, had sombre magnificence. Listen on BBC Sounds.)
As a climax of its bicentenary celebrations, the Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra, with the RAM women’s chorus and Tiffin Boys’ choir, as well as alumna Stephanie Wake-Edwards as mezzo-soprano soloist, squeezed on to the Festival Hall stage for Mahler’s Symphony No 3 in D minor. As epics go (this has been quite some week), at 110 minutes long, with outsized orchestra and embracing all aspects of heaven and earth, it is up there at the top.
Semyon Bychkov, the Academy’s Klemperer chair of conducting and a great Mahlerian, drew confident playing from these young musicians, many on the brink of careers. The brass section was especially dazzling, ready to enter the profession. The principal trumpet, who has plenty to do in this symphony, was a much-cheered star. Were I his mother I suspect I would have wept. I am not, but I did. It was that kind of a night.
Migrations tours the UK from 2 October to 26 November
Star ratings (out of five)
Migrations ★★★★
Aldeburgh festival ★★★★
Royal Academy of Music Symphony Orchestra ★★★★
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