Dalia (2020)
(A People's Opera)

The week in classical: Dalia: Ukrainian Freedom Orchestra and Aurora Proms - review

Garsington's refugee community opera bowls everyone over. At the Proms, uprooted Ukrainian musicians play as one, and Aurora Orchestra go to the brink

Just as Garsington's Dalia sounded its final note, the all-female RAF flypast set offfrom Brize Norton to spur on the Lionesses at Wembley (nearly swooping right over the oepra festival's Chilterns home on the journey east). In every sense, the timing for last Sunday's matinee, the last of tree performances, was ideal. With music by Roxanna Panufnik and libretto by Jessica Duchen, this new community opera had a pertinence no one could have foreseen when the work was commissioned (following the same team's success with Silver Birch in 2017). 

Women plaving "men's" sport, in this case cricket, in one part of its double-headed subject matter. The other is the global refugee crisis. A Syrian girl, Dalia Khaled, her home and family shattered, is cared for by a family in Britain. Despite their love and support, she encounters prejudice, until discovering a passion for cricket. Her Skill at spin bowling boosts her confidence and provides solace in the face of catastophe. With 180 performers - local High Wycombe schoolchildren, adult amateurs, opera professionals and the Philharmonia Orchestra - Dalia has a capacious reach. The involvement, via video link, of the Al Farah choir of Damascus and the Amwaj Choir of Bethlehem and Hebron, whose singing is part of the performance, further extends the work's ambition. There is alos, for good measure, an oud player (Rachel Beckles Willson) and a dog. Garsington's artistic director, Douglas Boyd, conducts. The streamlined show is directed by Karen Gillingham and designed by Rhiannon Newman Brown and her team.

Few composers know how to handle community opera, with its connotations of worthy and probably not very good. Benjamin Britten proved us wrang with Noye's Fludde. Jonathan Dove has triumphed, with The Palace in the Sky (2000), and others since. Welsh National Opera's Migrations, the work of many hands and composer Will Todd, is a current success. Panufnik, with Duchen, also knows how to stir the mix into something sharp, embracing and affecting. I anxiously watched the man next to me blow and sniff into his handkerchief, thinking I should aid him with a spare mask. He was weeping. It takes a particular aptitude, and artistic selflessness, to create something for sundry talents, including very young children who are quickly bored. (In the ladie's queu, a small girl asked me how I was doing. I said I was doing fine thankgs, and was she singing in Dalia? Singing and acting, came her emphatic and enthusiastic reply.)

Garsington Opera’s fifth and final production of the season has a relaxed, end-ofterm feel. The formal dress code associated with country-house opera is refreshingly absent and the applause is probably the most enthusiastic heard all summer. That’s because Dalia, receiving its world premiere, is the latest of Garsington's community operas, but the evening is far from light-hearted: with its story addressing the refugee crisis, this is the most serious and urgent subject matter of the season.

Five years on from The Silver Birch, their previous project for Garsington, the composer Roxanna Panufnik, librettist Jessica Duchen, conductor Douglas Boyd and director Karen Gillingham have teamed up again to produce a work involving almost 200 performers. Since the new piece was conceived, the plight of refugees has become even more pressing, but Dalia’s story hasn’t dated. A young adolescent, Dalia, has fled war in Syria, losing her father and brother to drowning at sea and becoming separated from her mother in a camp. She is fostered by a well-meaning family in a small English town where she initially meets simmering suspicion: “Not that we're not sorry for her, but what's she doing here?” sings the chorus.

But the local obsession is cricket, and the community eventually take Dalia to their hearts on account of the cricketing prowess she discovers within herself. Though there are a few opera plots involving football, baseball and other games, opera and sport usually stare at each other from opposite sides of the pitch, and this operatic paean to cricket is a first.

The stage is filled by local performers - Garsington Opera’s adult, youth and infant groups - and  expanded via video to include choirs from  Damascus, Bethlehem and Hebron, the Middle Eastern participants representing Dalia's inner voices. Panufnik’s richly textured score accommodates them all, not only with an oud player joining the Philharmonia Orchestra in the pit but through the use of Arabic modes and inflections.

Words and notes come thick and fast, but there are also operatic professionals on stage to handle them - the most operatic lines belonging to the foster mother Maya, given a soaring performance by Kate Royal. The 16-year-old Adrianna Forbes-Dorant brings assured presence to the title role, and Merit Ariane, Jonathan Lemalu, Ed Lyon and Andrew Watts are all strongly committed to the project. Yet, more significantly, many will have had their first experience on stage, and many lives will have been changed as a result.