"Who is Ali?" With that question begins the opera with also that name. The answer is short: it is a story of a refugee based on real events. You don't find many operas of that kind.
This is a story from a world that we know well enough by now from the media and some also from personal experience. Ali landed 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, bites and three composers work together to create a musically groundbreaking sound design. They do this with, among other things, recordings of sounds that are supposed to illustrate this hellish journey: Somali songs from the place 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, everyone had a say." Each of them put his own identity into it: American percussionist Grey Filastine was familiar with rhythms from different cultural traditions, Walid Ben Selim mixed in Moroccan hip-hop and American composer Brent Arnold blended all those non-Western influences into a very special soundtrack and poured those sounds into a score. You can feel the harsh journey through the desert burning in it and when approaching the coast you can smell the sea air.
The Chamber Orchestra of De Munt voiced everything flawlessly in an orchestra pit that was above the stage. Special mention though for the percussion musicians who together with the bassist emphasized the whipped-up rhythm during that escape route but also for 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 to their inventive right: that exhausting walking and nocturnal fleeing, captured almost stroboscopically, the shocking pick-up rides on impossible escape routes, the rolling and swirling Mediterranean Sea and the rescues. And of course there was that cynical "Welcome in Europe" moment with a fat wink at that wry "Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome, fremde, étranger, stranger" from the seventies film Cabaret, given so much scenic force by the group of dancers. For countertenor Brennan Hall who played the role of Ali, this entire evening was undoubtedly a feat. 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 things, the ungrateful role of smuggler.
Still a bold initiative by De Munt and KVS – where the performance took place – to confront this world premiere with their audience. After the performance they could also meet the real foster mother of the real Ali in a dialogue about the role of the organization Pleegzorg België. About the role of S.O.S. Méditerranée, the organization that picked up Ali in the midst of that rough sea, rescued him and brought him (and many other asylum seekers) ashore. It was good to hear once more that rescuing people at sea in distress according to international maritime law is a duty.
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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 (Mère-Femme-Vedette) and bass-baritone Kamil Ben Hsaïn Lachiri (human smuggler) - Director: Ricard Soler Mallol
- WHERE & WHEN: KVS BOL, Brussels 25 April 2024
- PHOTOS: © Simon Van Rompay
