ADORATION | BBC MUSIC - REVIEW

Opera and stage reviews

by: Steph Power | October, 2025

The premise of Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Adoration (2024) remains today as it was in 2008, when Atom Egoyan released the film on which her opera is based. Yet as polarisation has deepened across all areas of society, it has only increased in resonance. 

A student publicly outs his father as a terrorist who tried to smuggle a bomb onboard a flight to Tel Aviv in his pregnant wife’s luggage. What he doesn’t say, however, is that this is a fiction, encouraged as an ‘experiment’ by his teacher to spur debate. With librettist Royce Vavrek neatly splicing the dialogue between characters and across time, the ensuing moral altercations heighten the emotional fallout when shocking personal twists are revealed. 

Kouyoumdjian’s score — combining acoustic with electronic elements and deftly performed by an excellent cast, Silvana Quartet and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street under director Alan Pierson. — smartly captures the sense of unease, claustrophobia and grief. 

At the same time, it’s a launchpad to explore challenging intersected themes including xenophobia, betrayal, child exploitation and online hate: all laced with a cross-generational trauma and search for identity that the US composer — whose family were displaced from the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide — knows all too well. Beneath the knee-jerk and the black-and-white, acute complexities are revealed, and easy answers prove as elusive as they are ultimately hollow.