Page 540 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

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.