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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 22 - 28 April 1999 Issue No. 426
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Special Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Water wings and prayer
By David Blake
There were three gorgons, two immortal and one, the Medusa, the most poisonous of the three. If you saw her face you turned to stone. Her powers grew dangerous, so Athena rigged out Perseus with winged shoes, a helmet and magic mirror. He sliced off the head, taking it back to Athena to fix the filthy object to her shield. In the picture Perseus holds aloft Medusa's head in the piazza of the Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Cairo Opera Orchestra (Works by Shostakovich); violin solo Mahmoud Osman; conductor Mustafa Nagui; Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 10 April
If music be the food of love, sing on. Shostakovich always sings on and on and on. Doubtful if its the song of love, however. More like the song of hate, terror or sheer loss of locality.
Where is he, we, or the music coming from? Most of these things don't matter. But music, knowing no bounds at all, always solves its own problems, be it Bach or The Beatles. Twentieth century music has taught us to digest, even to love dirt, grit, material or moral disintegration. The contents of the garbage truck produce strange flowers.
But Shostakovich's music represents a new and complex problem. Though he inflates the classic surface to bursting point, he stops at the very brink and so the form never collapses. The surface is maintained, and listeners never know the thrill of actually going over the border. Mahler and Tchaikovsky, like Shostakovich, take us to the black holes of destruction, but they stop short and go no further.
Shostakovich's genius, however, had sadistic elements. In this eighth symphony, written during the second world war, on the blackest of dates, 1943, when the Soviet Union was facing the first tremors of its fall, circumstances found him in Stygian mood. No use asking for a road guide to this outpouring, one never existed. We are alone in one of the composer's zero worlds. It is everyone for himself.
If you were a turpitudinous Moscow bank clerk, and like Orestes you murdered your mother, then this could be your midnight music. A matricidal haunting by the furies, with the most viperish of them, the gorgon, doing a twist on the roof of the Kremlin with Stalin.
Shostakovich wrote 15 symphonies, giving him plenty of time to expand the medium, which he did with world-shaking results. But, like Sibelius, he had bottomless depths of romantic pessimism, which exhaust as well as stimulate.
The eighth is a mountain strewn with the dead or exhausted bodies of maestros who think they have a breathing apparatus which will allow them to survive the heights. Musical history has more or less sifted the dead from the victorious.
Mustafa Nagui, despite pre-performance doubts about his surviving altitude sickness and avalanche terror, did a fine, brave and, by the end, successful job. He is never fazed by a challenge, as his recent work shows, and from the start never faltered. In fact he seemed to revel in sorting out the incomprehensible bits of the symphony, and there are plenty. And he is good at architecture and enjoys simplifying those rhythmic chords that make awkward, fumbling key changes a listening burden.
At this point of the symphony, especially in the latter parts of the work, when Shostakovich goes careering through vast spaces, seemingly looking for a way out, Nagui's unique glosses are more or less life-saving -- don't try too hard, mate, you've lost your way. And his advice works, making the huge crumbling Himalaya fade out in a dusty calamity which is nonetheless positive. Nagui might be a gotterdammerung player. He has a long wind. The sounds of this symphony are not in themselves difficult listening, though the notes are lacerating. The notes of the classic formula do not fit the world they are ruthlessly bent to describe. Bent notes, as a type, are tough customers with which to wrestle -- the effect is creepy whispers, disappearances or shrinkings into invisibility. And then it comes, gradually. The monster, with a high dripping of blood and sweat, begins the mountaineering assault to the peak. And the orchestra bursts out obscenely. Never explain and never complain about Shostakovich and his problems because they result in music with wonderful holes in which to fall. What happens after the fall is up to the forces employed. Mustafa Nagui and the Cairo Opera Orchestra deserved their success.
Before this event was more Shostakovich, the violin concerto no. 1, played by Mahmoud Osman. Being a concerto, it did hold back Shostakovich's tidal wave sufficiently for Mohamed Osman to deliver the four short movements with such expertise that he made the heaps of notes, stops and various volumes sound simple. Even the endlessly changing tempi, which are a headache, managed to reveal Osman's tone in the hushed and easy atmosphere of this work.
Indian Classical Music and Dance; music, Vichitra Veena, played by Mustafa Raza; dance, Bharatha Natyan, by Srekala Bharath. Gomhouria Theatre, 13 April
Sometimes it seems as though, aeons ago, we were all Indian, thoughts prompted by this simple recital of dance and music by an Indian. It was well explained, and presented and performed on the comfortably modest stage of the Gomhouria Theatre. Everything was close enough, yet space allowed its grander aspects to be understood. Big auditoriums tend to produce a dim-out on Indian music -- a pity because the closer you are, the better the feeling. Its intimacy is its special charm, and the tones of its instruments are made for personal contact.
The Indian Trinity, Vrahma, Vishnu, Shiva, all danced and played the instruments which were heard so clearly. The Greeks imitated these instruments, then added their own wit and mythologising talent, but the pattern was made in the land of the Mahabharata. Very exciting to hear, in such circumstances, the veena being played. It is the oldest known instrument, going back thousands of years to when Brahma himself danced and played it.
The veena is a very beautiful thing. Its two small football-sized balloons, held together by a long slender assemblage of strings and key-like surfaces, look like what used to be called water wings, swimming equipment for beginners afraid of the sea. And its beautiful glowing sounds, bell-like, aquatic or aerial, glided and swam through the spaces of the Gomhouria, creating a unique sound decoration.
Mustafa Raza is a great artist. Assisted by a second string player and a percussive godfather-figure he began slowly, moved into moderate gear and then raced to the finish. Hungarian zigeuner music has a similar, three-step pattern, forming a strongly flavoured current in European and Oriental music. The playing of this Indian company revealed its ancient roots.
Srikala Bharath, the evening's dancer, did steps so ancient they precede history, belonging with the Creation. The dance is called Bharatha Natyam, and blends all the elements of dance, drama, expression and rhythm. Srikala Bharath is very beautiful, with huge, expressive eyes like lamps shining in the dark. Her movements suggest her lineage -- something Egyptian or Chinese, perhaps the Noh drama of Japan. The water wings of the veena have done a good job.
