The plight of migrants crossing the Mediterranean becomes a new Raft of the Medusa in Philippe Manoury’s evening-length, mixed-media piece, not short on ambition or conviction. Manoury nails his colours to the mast in a 10-minute Prelude of heaving live-orchestral and IRCAM-recorded electronic waves, inducing queasy fascination no less than the oily blandishments of two amplified actors who welcome us aboard the cruise ship Europa.

Listeners not content to float on the surface of Manoury’s dense, swirling, spatially organised textures will require both some German and a QR code reader at this point, to download the programme booklet for the original concerts, prepared, performed and recorded with evident dedication to the task. The story unfolds through keening, post-Expressionist choral settings of texts by Bachmann, Jelinek, Trakl and others, selected and unified by further contributions from the director Nicolas Stemann.

A mid-point theatrical ‘action’, featuring the direct testimony of rescue-ship crew members, is omitted from the recording, which produces a slight hiatus before the first entry or invasion of a large chorus, the refugees for which Europa has no room, without inhibiting the sense of a dramatic trajectory towards the score’s musical climax. This arrives, I would say, not in the summatory drama of ‘Mare nostrum’, the eighth of lab.oratorium’s nine sections, but in the preceding ‘Nachtmusik’ and ‘Melodram’, which weaves and layers two upper-voice vocal soloists against the actors. They sing and declaim a kind of Credo for compassion written by Manoury himself, and which inspires from him a restless, glittering musical soundscape reminiscent of vintage Stockhausen (Momente, say, or the third-act Festival from Donnerstag).

As a j’accuse aimed at the arrogance of European governments and attitudes,
lab.oratorium hits home with force and a certain nervous tension between deeply felt aesthetic and moral imperatives, though Manoury disavows an overt political agenda in one published interview while embracing an artist’s duty to respond to the world around him in another. Whether the piece changes any minds remains to be seen; potential converts to Manoury’s music rather than his political standpoint may be more persuaded by a ravishing Accentus album of his choral music (Naïve, 2011).