This performance of Cape Town Opera's celebration of the life of Nelson Mandela marked the European premiere of the work first produced when South Africa staged the 2010 Fifa World Cup. Three iconic episodes in Mandela's life form the trilogy. With Mandela's tribal initiation comes the realisation that, in apartheid South Africa, attaining manhood does not confer freedom; the central pillar is set in Johannesberg's Sophiatown, symbolic hub of black resistance and demolished in 1955, while the final episode sweeps through from Mandela's life imprisonment at the Rivonia trial to his release 34 years later.

Writer/director Michael Williams's use of a different composer for each act has its own logic: Allan Stephenson's Qunu Oratorio, set in the Transkei and sung in Xhosa, presents traditional music; Mike Campbell's vibrant jazz and blues numbers make up the unashamedly Broadway-style second act, while Péter-Louis van Dijk's prologue and interval tie into his third act. The stylistic inconsistencies pose problems – this is more musical than opera. An opening cacophony of sirens and banging of metal plates spells out incarceration, the simple curtain of steel-blue ribbons proving most effective design. In those seconds, the brutality and insidiousness of apartheid is shocking, but things get much softer-edged.

Nevertheless, the fine voice of Aubrey Lodewyk, the main Mandela figure, embodies an essential dignity and compassion. The monologues given him by van Dijk are properly operatic, revealing both his determination and his personal dilemmas, and it is this central thread that allows the piece to draw one in to what is after all one of the great stories of our time. Albert Horne conducts, and the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera is terrific in the pit.