“Take six stories, six librettists, an enormous cast including children and set it all to music. Stir vigorously. Add a flock of small birds, flapping, dancing and singing in search of their breeding ground. With an interlocking narrative crisscrossing history, from the pilgrim fathers to Bollywood, Enoch Powell’s rivers of blood speech and Indian doctors in the NHS of the 1960s, the African Caribbean slave trade in 18th-century Bristol, a new oil pipeline in rural Canada, English lessons for refugees and, for good measure, a space rocket, Welsh National Opera’s Migrations could have been an unholy mess. At its world premiere at the Millennium Centre, Cardiff, on Wednesday, it was anything but. Continue reading →