A migrant's tale: Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton's Odyssey wins hearts in Bristol

In a febrile UK political landscape overshadowed by a far right agenda of “stopping the boats” and “keeping Britain for the British”, composer Jonathan Dove and librettist Alasdair Middleton choose a deceptively simple contrarian device: a single refugee narrator tells his story, from its beginnings in his country of origin to his arrival in Europe. There are no facts, no figures, no explanation of the circumstances, just a human story told in a straightforward musical language, with poetry, with humanity and with immense power.

Creating a dramatic work with the express intention of making a political statement is a risky business. It’s all too easy to to lapse into hectoring the audience or to allow one’s rage at injustices to boil over and spoil the art. But when the pitfalls are avoided, the results can be magnificent. Odyssey, performed for the first time at Bristol Beacon, is nothing short of a triumph.

This was a performance on a very large scale, around an hour’s music for soprano and tenor soloists, an orchestra of 60 and three choirs, totalling some 150 singers. All performed with excellence. The intelligibility of the choirs was extraordinary for such a large number, as was their dynamic control; one of the most notable attributes of this music is how Dove makes the sound swell and release, and the choirs, all from Bristol, played a huge part in creating these effects with long, swooping dynamic shapes. Dove’s musical picturing of the small boat pitching in the sea was especially effective, with the choirs mesmerising as they swayed in time to the roll of the waves. Dove’s music has giant reserves of dark, melodic beauty, and his instrument combinations are continually shifting so that the music has taken you to a new place before you’ve realised it. Tension is built and then relaxed as your ear is prepared for the next episode of the story.

Conductor David Ogden kept everything pin sharp. The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s strings provided the underpinning for a host of precision-calibrated sonorities from brass, woodwind and percussion. It’s not that the orchestra drew attention to itself – but if you dragged yourself away from the story for a moment, you realised quite how good their sound was. Our narrator (just named “Him”) was Thando Mjandana, whose appealing tenor gave us earnestness, tenderness, strength of character. The Beacon is a big space and you might have asked for a voice one size larger, but Ogden did well at keeping the orchestral sound from overpowering him. Francesca Chiejina was not in need of any additional power and impressed inasmuch as the smaller role of The Mother permitted (she bookends the piece, fearing for the welfare of Him and his siblings, whom she has exiled for their safety).

Virtuosic as were the music and its performance, just as many plaudits go to Middleton, for his perfect pacing of the eight scenes, his exquisite use of poetic device, the ability of his words to put you into the body of the refugee without feeling manipulated (you have been manipulated, of course, but that’s the librettist’s skill). Often, he uses simple words strung together: “Friends, Bandits, Police” as the refugees see lights in the night and don’t know whose paths they are crossing; “Shunted, Shifted, Shoved, Denied” as they are herded into a camp.

The beginning and end are telling. When the story starts, He is with his family at home, a place of picnics under quince trees, a place where there is “bread in the oven, white sheets on the bed and the sun sets behind a jar of honey”: the need to escape starts when it is burnt down in civil war. Without ever mentioning the words, it exposes the lie of the hallowed phrase “economic migrants”. The migrants have been (immensely beautifully) singing of “Europa”  as the promised land, but in the end, when asked “why”, the migrants can only answer “This Hell is better than the Hell we come from”. It’s a gut-wrenching end.

A word for the venue. Formerly Colston Hall, Bristol Beacon reopened in November after a longer-than-expected closure for a more-expensive-than-expected and, by all accounts, much needed refurbishment. The hall is now gorgeous on the eyes and thoroughly acceptable acoustically – this piece certainly put it through its paces and it passed with aplomb. Odyssey was preceded by a couple of short performances involving children from two Schools of Sanctuary, facilitated by compere MoYah and Don Jaga, former refugees themselves. It was good to see the children on stage: some looked confident, others looked terrified, but all were drinking in the limelight. It will be an experience to remember for them and it was a great way to draw in an audience for classical choral music.