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With luck, Rolf Hind’s latest work will highlight the eloquence and depth of Sufi mystic Rumi’s poetry – but the opera is a curate’s egg
As opera seeks to redefine itself, the idea of music-drama as meditation is a potentially powerful one. Music can sustain thought and feeling outside time, and the composer Rolf Hind has already used this concept in his innovative four-hour “mindfulness opera” of 2016, Lost in Thought. That piece included just four lines of a poem by the famous Sufi mystic Rumi; now the text has been has vastly extended by Dante Micheaux to create a narrative of around 100 minutes about Rumi’s life, in Sky in a Small Cage: the result is a more straightforward, but highly unusual opera.
Hind’s music, in an individual strain of minimalism, is haunting: ringing, chiming, often the single lines heard from a mixed ensemble of chamber orchestra, gamelan and nagaswaram, are coloured or echoed across the stage. The instrumentalists sit in two groups, while in Sasha Balmazi-Owen’s clear and simple designs, six reflecting sheets turn round, fast or slow, in bright or dim light, and the singers move at the front under a structure slightly too reminiscent of a McDonald’s arch.
The atmosphere, after some wild initial wild celebrations that recur at the close, is sober, often anguished. The characters are archetypes as well as people, emerging most powerfully in the relationship between Rumi, sung by the excellent counter-tenor James Hall, and Shams the Bird of the Sun, eloquently sung by Yannis François; they achieve a closeness that Rumi and his wife Shaman of the Birds, strongly sung by Loré Lixenberg, do not quite achieve.
Through it all, the urgent and passionate voice of Narrator Elaine Mitchener guides us through Rumi’s poetry as it moves towards its message of universal love. The text is projected on the set, and was also handed out on crowded tiny printed sheets before the performance. Supported by an active group of six bird-like ensemble singers, the narrative of achieving love in all things, “each ray of sun caressing every living thing” moves inexorably forward towards a final dance of departure.
Hind’s piercing music is varied, but arguably not quite enough so to match the internal drama of the text over an unbroken hour and a half. But the problem of the concept runs deeper. There is surely a fundamental contradiction between the long narrative-driven story that librettist Dante Micheaux has created with the best of intentions, and the meditative musical statis to which Hind aspires. That makes the genre of the work an uneasy compromise.
This does not reflect on the high professionalism with which Mahogany Opera, directed by Frederic Wake-Walker, have mounted the piece, nor the committed playing of the instrumentalists of the Riot Ensemble whose sonorities echoed around the hall. The impassively expert conductor, Aaron Holloway-Nahum, stationed off to one side of the stage, held everything together firmly, without fuss. The show will hopefully highlight the eloquence and depth of Rumi’s poetry, internationally famous but too little known here, overshadowed by the western tradition. But it crystallises the problem of trying to link together the storydriven basis of opera with its meditative potential.
No further performances