The power of Zaide

It hasn't made him popular with those who like to keep politics out of opera, but Peter Sellars has a knack of teasing out contemporary resonances from familiar scenarios. His latest triumph is to highlight the themes of slave trafficking and sexual servitude in Mozart's incomplete Zaide.

In his presentation before this semi-staged performance (already staged in Vienna and bound for New York), Sellars chose not to expatiate on the connections himself, but introduced two speakers. The Director of Anti-Slavery International told us that an estimated 12 million people still live in slavery today.

A representative of The POPPY Project recounted the harrowing but entirely typical life-story of one of her clients: abused, beaten, repeatedly raped, every day, here in Britain.

Having provided that context, Sellars does not need to distort or misrepresent. The enslaved heroine, Zaide, here the superb Hyunah Yu, sings movingly of her hopes for the future; for her later song of a bird imprisoned in a cage, she is handcuffed to a table. Her lover, Gomatz (Norman Shankle), is brutalised by the Sultan, Soliman (Russell Thomas), who is challenged to question his own tyrannical behaviour by his overseer, Allazim (Alfred Walker). Casting excellent black singers in these parts, Sellars alludes also, if perhaps too loosely, to the Muslim/Christian divide.

Concerto Kˆln, under Louis L·ngree, provided incisive accompaniments and apt interpolations from Mozart's Thamos, King of Egypt.

The timing and other dramaturgical aspects need sharpening up, and the denouement is unsatisfactory. But art as engaged as this has the power to change the world.

Zaide