Sky in a Small Cage review – beauty and bafflement in opera inspired by Sufi mystic Rumi

The life and writings of the 13th-century Sufi mystic and poet Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi, better known as Rumi, provide the inspiration for Rolf Hind’s opera. First seen in Copenhagen last month, Sky in a Small Cage was brought to the Barbican in the same Mahogany Opera production, directed by Frederic Wake-Walker.
The relationship between the poet, who was born in 1207 in what is now Anatolian Turkey, and the dervish Shams-e Tabrizi, with whom he is said to have spent 40 days that changed the course of his life, provides the 90-minute opera with its emotional core, and, it turns out, with its most powerful, most conventionally operatic moments. Around that event Dante Micheaux’s libretto, which incorporates Rumi’s own poetry, presents the story of his life in a series of disconnected episodes, which are mostly conveyed through a narrator, Elaine Mitchener, whose delivery ranges between speech and declamation while, at one point, Loré Lixenberg as the Shaman of the Birds launches into a fully fledged operatic scena including a loudhailer.
Underpinning the voices, the 16 members of the Riot Ensemble, conducted by Aaron Holloway-Nahum, are used economically, often with just a solo instrumental line, perhaps a cor anglais or a horn, and a chiming gong or pulsing drum providing the accompaniment; a group of plucked instruments – guitar, harps, double bass – sometimes seems to function like a baroque continuo group.
The disconnection between many of the numbers often makes the action hard to follow, but in the section dealing with Rumi and Shams, which ends in the latter’s death, everything seems to click into focus. At this point Wake-Walker’s staging seems less intrusive, the drama becomes clearer and the music intensely beautiful. It’s here too that the singers portraying Rumi and Shams, countertenor James Hall and baritone Yannis François, really come into their own; they otherwise seem to flit in and out of the opera in a rather unconvincing way. But elsewhere bafflement is never far away.
For those thoroughly immersed in Rumi’s world and his writings perhaps it would have seemed more coherent and rewarding; for the rest of us it was often hard going.