These three operas represent landmarks in Michael Ellison’s intensive immersion in Turkish culture, history and music, which he combines seamlessly with a piquant postwar Western modernism. A professor at Bristol University, the American-born composer spent ten years living in Istanbul where he studied traditional instruments, vocal practices and more, co-founding the Hezarfen Ensemble which forms the backbone of each, wholly committed performance.
The works are transcultural on several levels, exploring between them issues of minority oppression and cultural fragmentation, environmental exploitation and spiritual awakening. Earliest is Mevlâna (Say I am you, 2012, conductor Lucas Vis), drawn from poetry by Rumi (English libretto by Ellison) and narrating his transformation from ordinary scholar to ecstatic mystic. Here vocal atmosphere and drive is shaped by VocaalLab Nederland, supporting through an array of utterances the five principal characters.
Deniz Küstü (The Sea Crossed Fisherman, 2016; English libretto by Simon Jones, conductor Michael Rafferty) is most directly Western in approach and perhaps the least convincing in its relentless activity. Yet there is much to admire in its adaptation of dissident writer Yaşar Kemal’s proto-environmentalist novel, with roiling seascapes and outsider themes packed into 70 minutes.
Most ambitious and compelling is the two-hour bozlak opera Binboğalar Efsanesi (Legend of a Thousand Bulls, 2023, conductor Can Okan). Sung in Turkish, with Ellison’s libretto adapted from Kemal’s novel, it features an astonishing cast of traditional singers and instrumentalists in an urgent, heartbreaking tale of the decline