Metier proudly presents composer Michael Ellison’s ground-breaking set of Three Transcultural Operas: Mevlana (Say I am you), Deniz Küstü (The Sea Crossed Fisherman), and bozlak opera Binboğalar Efsanesi (Legend of a Thousand Bulls), all performed with the Hezarfen Ensemble, the leading Turkish contemporary music ensemble co-founded by Michael Ellison.

Ellison spent ten years working in Istanbul and has imbued these operas with an unprecedented level of integration of Turkish culture, music, and traditional instruments, seamlessly blending them with contemporary music in a unique and personal idiom. Ellison's is a music of singing melody, colour, and contrast, evocative atmosphere, and emotional breadth and has been described as “beautifully crafted, robust, and absorbing” by the American Record Guide.

A new, 2026 High Resolution edition of Mevlana (originally released in 2014 on Métier) joins the newly recorded performances of Deniz Küstü and Binboğalar Efsanesi to bring together a first complete triptych of operas. Alongside the audio recordings, Métier will release the complete digital video productions of Deniz Küstü and Binboğalar Efsanesi operas recorded at the Istanbul Music Festival.

Mevlana (Say I am You) was the first opera to include Turkish instruments and vocal styles, blended here with Western operatic tradition and based on the poetry of Rumi, the historic mystic. This hypnotic work dramatically traces the story of the transformation of Jelaluddin Rumi (Mevlâna) from ordinary scholar to ecstatic mystic at the hands of wandering dervish Shams-i Tabriz and features the dynamic vocal ensemble VocaalLAB Nederland with the Hezarfen Ensemble.

Ellison’s second and third operas are compelling tales that resonate with the global challenges of today, both adapted from novels by Yaşar Kemal and directed for stage by Simon Jones. Powerful and dramatic, Deniz Küstü (The Sea Crossed Fisherman) tells the tragic tale of village-loner Selim and orphaned street-child Zeynel, integrating traditional Turkish instruments, contemporary elements, and Western opera singers. Its shocking events and environmental repercussions reflect our own current concerns. The opera also celebrates Istanbul, its seas and marine life, contrasting the real and fantastical seascape of the Bosphorus with the dizzying, teeming metropolis of Istanbul and one small fishing village.

“The Sea-Crossed Fisherman is an arresting picture of Istanbul, from its glittering dawns to its seething underbelly, and Kemal’s…lyrical prose is a good fit for the American composer Michael Ellison…” – James Imam, Opera Magazine

Powerful and moving, Binboğalar Efsanesi (Legend of a Thousand Bulls) is based on the masterpiece novel by Yaşar Kemal about the decline and disappearance of the last nomads in Turkey, as their millennia-old pastoral way of life is destroyed. The culmination of an 8-year European Research Council project, “Beyond East and West”, Binboğalar Efsanesi is a unique work, sung in Turkish, and integrates the dramatic, virtuoso style of traditional bozlak Anatolian folk music voices with contemporary language. Hale Tetik, of Andante Magazine, wrote: “The love, sorrow, grief, and rebellion, emanating from the voice of bozlak singer Fatma Aydoğan, were engraved in our hearts.”

Michael Ellison has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras and festivals across Europe and the US, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble Variances, Radio France, Grenoble Festival, New York Youth Symphony, Siemens Foundation, amongst many others. He was principal investigator on the European Research Council project Beyond East and West: Developing and Documenting an Evolving Transcultural Musical Practice (2015-2023) and the PI of the AHRC-Istanbul Development Agency supported project Transtraditional Istanbul. He teaches composition at the University of Bristol, England.