Ashraf Sewailam’s résumé contains all the things one would expect of a distinguished bass-baritone at OSW: major opera companies & major roles. It also contains an architecture education and animated film credits: For Disney’s Arabic-language productions, Sewailam helped direct the dubbing and supplied voices for characters including Mickey Mouse and Ursula. This is a fairly broad casting range, even by our standards (more on this below).
Born in Egypt, Sewailam worked with the Cairo Opera before building a career that has carried him from New Zealand to New York. He has also increasingly worked as a stage director, notably directing Rossini’s Otello for Central City Opera.
Opera Southwest audiences know him especially from our 2019 revival of Giovanni Bottesini’s Alì Babà. Anthony Barrese reconstructed the nineteenth-century score from the surviving manuscript, restoring a work that had effectively vanished from the stage for more than a century. Sewailam played the title character.
Now he returns for Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ, in which he plays two characters at opposite ends of the moral spectrum. First comes King Herod, tormented by a dream that a child will overthrow him. His great aria, “Ô misère des rois!” (listen here), gives us an unexpectedly sympathetic portrait of a tyrant. Berlioz allows him several minutes of genuine anguish.
Things become stranger when Herod summons his soothsayers, who will hand him a remedy – a death sentence for the infants of his kingdom. Their cabalistic dance (listen at 21:44) is written in 7/4 time, seven beats to a measure, which was a pretty surprising choice for 1854. The music seems perpetually off balance, as if the orchestra itself has fallen under their spell.
Later, in Egypt, Sewailam becomes the Father of the Family, a hospitable stranger who offers shelter to Mary, Joseph, and their child after everyone else has turned them away. His music is as generous as Herod’s is troubled. Immediately after an exquisite little dance for two flutes and harp, he offers the exhausted Mary and Joseph comfort in “Vous pleurez, jeune mère” (listen at 1:19:08).
OSW presents the Symphonic Chorus in Berlioz’ L’Enfance du Christ November 15, 2026 at 2pm
