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.
