"Who is Ali?" That is the question with which the opera of the same name begins. The answer is brief: it is a story of a refugee based on true events. You don't find many operas like that.
This is a story from a world that we have by now come to know well from the media and some also from personal experience. This Ali arrived in 2019, after a journey of two years and thousands of kilometers, as a refugee and asylum seeker in Brussels, with Ciska V., who became his foster mother. She knows director Ricard Soler Mallol, to whom Ali tells his story one evening. Deeply impressed, he develops a libretto for a music theater project.
Peter de Caluwe, always interested in new artistic creations, seizes the opportunity and three composers together work out a musically boundary-crossing sound design. They do this with, among other things, recordings of sounds meant to illustrate this hellish journey: Somali songs from where the story began, recordings from the refugee camp in Calais, Arabic melodies, mixed with electronic music and especially supported by a strong African rhythm. They made computer designs, sent the score back and forth to each other, made changes until a usable score could be extracted.
"We were composers without pen or paper who nevertheless wrote an opera together, it was a democratization of composing, each of us had a say." Each of them put their own identity into it: American percussionist Grey Filastine was familiar with rhythms from different cultural traditions, Walid Ben Selim mixed Moroccan hip-hop into it, and American composer Brent Arnold merged all those non-Western influences into a very special soundtrack and cast those sounds into a score. You can feel the harsh journey through the desert burning there and when approaching the coast, smell the sea air.
The Chamber Orchestra of De Munt brought it all to life flawlessly in an orchestra pit positioned above the stage. Special mention should go to the percussion musicians who, together with the bassist, accentuated the frenetic rhythm during that escape route, but also to the string players who had to suggest the days-long silences in captivity and the wind players who underscored the violent scenes with smugglers, all kept in check by conductor Michiel Delanghe.
In the staging, those painful moments of their route came inventively into their own: that exhausting walking and nocturnal fleeing, captured almost stroboscopically, the shocking pick-up rides on impossible escape routes, the undulating and swirling Mediterranean Sea and the rescues. And then there was of course that cynical "Welcome in Europe" moment with a big wink at that bitter "Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome, fremde, étranger, stranger" from the seventies film Cabaret, scenically reinforced with so much power by the group of dancers. For countertenor Brennan Hall, who played the role of Ali, this entire evening was certainly a tour de force. The same can be said of Ali's mother, serenely sung by mezzo-soprano Raphaële Green, and for bass-baritone Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri, who played, among other roles, the thankless part of the smuggler.
Nevertheless, a daring initiative by De Munt and KVS – where the performance took place – to confront their audience with this world premiere. After the performance, they could also meet Ali's real foster mother in a dialogue about the role of the organization Pleegzorg België. About the role of S.O.S. Méditerranée, the organization that picked Ali up in the middle of that rough sea, rescued him, and brought him (and many other asylum seekers) ashore. It was good to hear once again that the rescue of people in distress at sea is a duty under international maritime law.
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- WHAT: Opera Ali, world premiere.
- WHO: music: Grey Filastine, Walid Ben Selim, and Brent Arnold - libretto: Ali d'Ali Abdi OMar and Ricard Soler Mallol. Chamber Orchestra De Munt, conducted by Michiel Delanghe; countertenor Brennan Hall (Ali); mezzo-soprano Raphaële Green (Mother-Woman-Star) and bass-baritone Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri (human trafficker) - Direction: Ricard Soler Mallol
- WHERE & WHEN: KVS BOL, Brussels 25 April 2024
- PHOTOS: © Simon Van Rompay