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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters About as dead as Hamlet
By David BlakeCairo Symphony Orchestra; Kirill Rodin, soloist; Felix Carrasco, conductor; Main Hall: Cairo Opera House, 13 Jan
If you cannot abide Time, then Richard Strauss's opera Der Rosenkavalier is not for you. It is a chilly, bleak story about what happens when the old, glamorous and stinking rich fall in love with the brilliant high-prancing young. Beds abound. The opera opens with the heroine, the Princess, enjoying a frisky night with her latest boyfriend. Laughingly, she tells him he is to be the bearer, the cavalier of the silver rose to the rich and beautiful young heiress that her decadent old relative wishes to marry. The boy delivers the rose, falls in love with the young girl. So two beautiful babes are left to face life's complexities. And the elderly must resign themselves to being spectators.
Not to worry -- enjoy every aspect of the vulgar passing show, beauty tarnishes and we all go down the same chute of Time regardless. We pay our own bills in the end, as the princess says.
Sounds trite, sounds démodé, sounds dead -- about as dead as Hamlet. Because there is Richard Strauss and his music to hear. And this is where Felix Carrasco and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra come in. Together they and the conductor gave a long diverse programme with many thrilling new slants. He is from Mexico's Philharmonic Orchestra, but trained in Vienna at the Hochschule für Musik. This background shows in his work. There is no overall blank music-making coming from this conductor. Carrasco worked once with Thomas Christian David, who was briefly music director of the Cairo Opera House.
This symphonic suite taken from his opera gave Strauss a chance to preempt any tricks by arrangers to stir up the spicy story with schmaltz or tears. There are no tears in the opera, and there were none at this performance either.
Carrasco let loose through the Cairo Opera House a stream of orchestra magic which must be about the most exciting ever heard in this place. He allowed the Cairo Orchestra to plunge in and appear to lose their heads in the gorgeous display; but in reality, they did not. They and Carrasco clung to la gloire -- page after page of the music was absolutely firm-fixed and illustrative of the scenes which should by rights be sung on the opera stage. Here they sang to the voices of the entire orchestra and its maestro.
At the end of the cynical louche tale, Carrasco rose into areas not often achieved. We were given the pay-off, as the whole work slides into the most famous trio in all opera. They sing of love and respect the beauty of the young, never complain when the young break up the China shop we, the elderly, have made of life. We did worse ourselves at the same age. The princess makes no grumbles as her boy dashes off into the night with his new girlfriend. We all do the same things with life. Enjoy it, don't grumble; it will end soon enough.
And so the heartbreak and the rich tormenting flash of life goes on like a crazy waltz. It's very much this city.
By the end of this performance Carrasco and the wonderful Cairo Symphony Orchestra had turned the night into a festival. There were shouts and bravos and unstoppable applause. So much for the performance of opera in Cairo -- the word goes like this: the Egyptians don't really like opera, they don't understand it, for big things like R Strauss, Wagner and Szymanowski, there's no orchestra. Where's the orchestra for King Roger (now that's an opera!) or Bartok? The answer seems to be right here at the Cairo Opera House. Just give them a challenge and see what the audience will do.
The rose cavalier ended the concert. It began with an imposing, completely fortress-like account of the Dvörak Concerto for cello and orchestra, op. 104, with the Russian visitor Kirill Rodin as soloist. Carrasco is a real maestro. Whatever the wars of the musical scene present him with, he seems to know how to ride the situation, and he drew out of the player and orchestra an almost monolithic performance.
The classics -- the end of the nineteenth century -- put it all before them, the listeners. Tunes, interweaving inventions which Dvörak sets before the cellist to negotiate, were all clearly drawn for the attentive listeners to enjoy with maximum clarity.
Dvörak has a warm soft centre at times, when exploited by a conductor. Nothing like this happened with Carrasco. The opening movement was imposing -- no ease, but tension, which allowed the player to show his very beautiful tones in fluctuations of loud and soft and almost echoing pianissimi. Rodin is a generous, comforting player, so the Dvörak angst in the generally easy-going music is a grateful spice; but the careless rapture never lasted for very long.
In the second movement, there is a real unease. The flute is much to the front in this concerto. It joins with the cello in long despairing exchanges, sometimes salutary, at others, like the philosopher, easing the sting out of their troubles. More like a forest bird: Don't go too close to the edge, you'll fall off. Three times it sings with the soloist its warning from the tree tops. Three times its warnings are ignored.
And then the cello hurtles off into its chosen role as singer, nervous, anguished and finally exultant, but probably vanquished. Dvörak always went on voyages, the angst-ridden traveller who seemed to have no home but on the waves of a great river. Throughout this dramatic work so loved by players, Rodin seemed to be a bird man. He has a strange way of sitting at the instrument, off-balance and poised, as if for sudden flight -- perched on his chair, feet arched beneath him, vividly talking, chattering in floods of pianissimo scales, challenging and cursing.
A real and genuine creature making the notes live and spring at us, full of questions. Not a frozen star-player cemented in his position on the performance circuit. At the end, his performance had great magnificence.
The centre of the concert was a premiere of a work in three sections by Nubian composer Amr Okba, called Pictures of the Nuba.
The first two sections were called The Nagrachad and The Flood. What was expected did not come first, so we were given much noise and orchestral loudness which passed into the flood. It sounded less watery than military. The strength and force of the sounds were often almost abstract, but the earth was in commotion, for sure.
And then it came. The third piece is called Consolation. Consolation for what? A world lost, or a world found in irony? Whatever the intention, as music it was daring, very beautiful and perfectly composed. Over a strange, complex carpet of sounds, all of them vertical and columnar, float harp sounds, delivered with almost electric clarity. They glide and glisten high up over the increasing volume of the base, which never varies in its colour, ionised, yellowish grey. The harps sing like birds on the wing. The desert earth goes on rising and we ourselves are afloat finally in the mystical spaces of -- maybe -- some sort of Nubia. Strange place, neither here nor there and not forgotten. A ghost felucca or a desert bird with wonderful sails and no body, gone far away -- space has many uses these days.
