When composer Nigel Osborne isn't busy with his professorial duties at the University of Edinburgh, he is in Bosnia doing music therapy for war-scarred children. The two worlds have collided to some extent in his work before, but never as head-on as in his latest opera, given its first UK showing as part of the City of London festival.
First seen in Mostar a month ago, Differences in Demolition involves singers from Opera Circus alongside a team from all over former Yugoslavia. It has an English libretto by Bosnian poet Goran Simic and, most distinctively, a score fashioned by Osborne around the twisting, yearning augmented intervals of traditional Bosnian sevdah music.
The result is a 90-minute chamber opera that touches more obliquely and cool-headedly on the Balkan war than some of Osborne's previous works, but is probably the more effective for it.
Simic's fluent libretto takes a modern migrant builder back into the world of his ancestors in a narrative that feels like a folk tale. A benevolent witch controls events from above the stage, and true love endures to the end, but there is no clear moral. Amid a piece that seems more than anything a lament for the destruction of Bosnian homes, the jaunty penultimate chorus seems out of place.
Otherwise, dark musical colours dominate; there are comic scenes, mostly involving Croatian singer Mladen Vasari, but it is humour with a Balkan flavour. The rest of the cast is British, with Robert Rice hangdog as Hasan, and Monica Brett-Crowther incisive as his lost love Sevda. There is no conductor, but the singers are well-coordinated with the six-piece ensemble. The language of sevdah may not be Osborne's own, but he is very convincingly himself when writing in it.
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