It’s all too easy for an artistic labour of love to turn inward, particularly when there’s a political point to be made with it. But Nigel Osborne’s latest opera, the result of years spent absorbing Bosnian musical culture and working with the victims of the country’s horrific civil war, brims with the conviction of a composer passionate to pass on what he has learnt.
The result is part fairytale, part polemic – a sort of operatic magic realism in which reality bleeds into fantasy, but the characters plug on regardless. And just as the events onstage flicker between the folksy and the tragic, so Osborne’s evocative sound-world refracts the traditional Bosnian sevdah melodies and scales through a harshly modernist prism. The prominent accordion player in the Mostar Sinfonietta (who tear through Osborne’s score as if their lives depended on it) is at once the voice of metallic dissonance and of soulful, Balkan angst. It’s a stunning collision of two worlds that couldn’t be more different.
It is true that there’s a fair number of red herrings and blind alleys to negotiate along the way. But, given what we know about the break-up of Yugoslavia, the kernel of Goran Simic’s sparse, lucid and singable libretto rings true: the destruction of a home, a bitter rivalry between three brothers, and a world turned upside down by conflict and ignorance. It’s both fantastical and oddly convincing, for example, when Monica Brett-Crowther’s alluring, bright-toned Sevda – the woman lost and loved by the opera’s melancholic hero, Hasan – returns as a rich stranger who attempts to bribe the family into demolishing their house. A quixotic scherzo, when a policeman and a handcuffed atheist stumble into Hasan’s house before the latter is mysteriously struck by lightning, is more than a little reminiscent of the blackly humorous capers of Pozzo and Lucky in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Sharper work from director Lenka Udovicki would have better drawn out the opera’s concentrated power: her production is more about the striking tableaux than it is about handling her cast. Equally, fielding a Bosnian actor, Mladen Vasari, among the British opera singers created problems of ensemble and comprehension. But, in the half-ruined Wilton’s Music Hall, this journey into an almost ruined nation is gripping.