Differences in Demolition

Published Friday 13 July 2007 at 17:00 by Edward Bhesania

Since 1993 Osborne has been leading creative workshops in war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina, and his new opera, with a libretto by Bosnian Goran Simic, features the sevdah, a traditional and often melancholic song style of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

It tells of Hasan, a present-day demolition worker in the West, who recalls his family home, an inn. What unfolds is a folk-like legend, in which we meet Hasan’s older brothers one driven by greed, the other by war and the servant Sevda, for whom Hasan harbours affections. A white witch weaves a magical family scarf, which gets torn three ways as the brothers come to blows. The rest of the opera concerns the piecing together of the scarf by Sevda, before realising that Hasan has disappeared; whereupon we see her present-day incarnation searching for him at the demolition site.

If the scenario seems straightforward on the surface, there’s a deeper mystery and symbolism which is evocative but oblique; but Osborne manages in the music to seamlessly incorporate the sevdah, Balkan scales and upbeat dances with his own contemporary idiom. Often it’s the last that’s most beguiling, with often mesmeric writing especially for clarinet and accordion, who play alongside members of the Mostar Sinfonietta.

The singers are strong all round, particularly Monica Brett-Crowthers’s Sevdah, Andy Morton’s middle brother Balkan, and the unwaveringly focused stage presence of Mladen Vasari as the oldest-brother, Zlatan.

On a single hearing it doesn’t quite feel as if everything is pulling in the same direction, but a joy in creating new music theatre and the excitement of a new collaboration there certainly is.