 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
 |
 |
|
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 May 1999 Issue No. 429
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
|
|
|
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Breaking the mould
By David Blake
Bartok
Who broke the classical mould of European 20th century music? It was Hungary. While the Viennese and Russians sent music to other planets, Hungary, like the black musicians of America, made the break and stayed at home.
Hungarian music disturbed, then excited, the rest of the world. And, when the classic form finally broke down, out flowed the dance. This music blew the commemorative classics over the hills. It has a soul that joins earth to heaven just as the country itself joins East to West. Nothing about Hungarian music is small: vast forms and rhythms are at work, and however highly coloured the surface forms may be, the excitement that is its fertility of power wells up from beneath.
The German Embassy and the Goethe Institute of Cairo have made, in the European Music Programme which they have organised, the useful and helpful gesture of inviting musicians from European countries to bring their wares to the vast and turbulent platform of Cairo. Europe's music -- der heilige kunst, the holy art -- is its ultimate treasure. And in these blameful days, Europe's music is as well Euro-American and Afro-Arab.
For the European Music Programme Hungary has plumped for first-line mid-century image breakers: Bartok, Kodaly, Kurtag, Leo Weine, Zsolt Serei, Gergely Vajdas, Andras Petroc, Gyorgy Kurtags, Adam Kondors and Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs.
The musicians chosen to perform these often complex works are from Budapest: Maria Horvath, soprano; Galor Cslog, pianist; Czaba Klenyan, clarinet. The soprano has a fine operatic career ahead, and the pianist is one of Hungary's best young players, a pupil of Andreas Schiff. The clarinet offers Czaba Klenyan, who has worked in America with the best orchestras. All of these musicians come from the Bartok and Liszt Academies of Budapest.
The only thing missing from the concert is the sound of a Hungarian orchestra. In Bartok's opera, Bluebeard's Castle, a work which places him in the Verdi-Wagner category, such an orchestra can be blood-curdling and hair-raising.
Cairo Symphony Orchestra; Favourites VI; Hassan Sharara, violin; Taha Nagui, conductor; Main Hall: Cairo Opera House, 6 May
A lot of life comes from the tone of Hassan Sharara's violin when he begins to play. It's all a joy ploy. He makes playing the fiddle look so easy. He comes out, gives a regal look down his long nose and arranges his feet, this latter very important to violinists because they, like singers, must place their feet as comfort demands. He sees everything. He's arranged to go into action, and stands there like a bronze statue of George III, about to declare war on the American colonies. And it's off we go.
Introduction or not, he doesn't move. Then it comes and he's into the music. He's very serious. Easy as it looks, the violin is not always a friend. To Sharara it is: he is lover, father, boyfriend, judge and critic. He's everyone's violinist, from a generation that has no need of hype and does not trust it.
Whatever the commotions of the moment may be musically, this tall laconic man takes the fiddle and begins. The voice is talking, singing, crooning, laughing. But no rage, and no erotica. No sliding or shivering through notes. He's sensual but not erotic.
His playing of Attia Sharara's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No 2 was a shock. It might have been Brahms or Mendelssohn. As a piece, its not ordinaire only by the way it is played. There is a tune at the beginning which turns out to be a practical piece of travel luggage for the rest of the work. The tune is put through every conceivable variation: key change, tempo variations and colouring. It has colouratura delicacy and full-out fortissimo.
Its not dull, it even sparkles here and there. But the tune hovers in and out like an eel. It seems to get lost but no -- there's the tail, speeding around the corner in another key, poised and ready to begin a sort of Rossini-like crescendo effect. The tune changes everything but its basic shape.
Over and through all this, Hassan Sharara plays fresh, unconcerned, with not a care, the tone of his violin totally visible through every climax. He has inexhaustible energy, he even does a small dance of pleasure here and there. He's enjoying himself and he believes in this work, and so it stays very much alive. Sharara and this concerto No 2 shine on happily, but God knows what would happen if the master suddenly got sick of it.
In the adagio the tune has been routed. It threads out into long strands of sound so beautiful the audience claps and murmurs. This is a nice old-fashioned thing done years ago at diva recitals. Sharara knows how to manage the whole scene. He brings the audience to a hushed awe at his expertise. The finish is athletic hurdles -- high jumps, joyful and happy.
The concert opened with Mozart's Symphony in G minor K550. The Cairo Symphony did a sharp job of revivification -- no travel creases on the surface. To finish up, Otto Nicolai wrote an opera on the Merry Wives of Windsor before Verdi. It is a nice, ordinary matinée opera for a good cast, and far from Verdi's masterful Falstaff, which blew it out of the windows of the world opera houses. Where are the steeds of the night galloping around Herns Oak Windsor?
But the audience had something to take away with them, in the unearthly playing of Sharara's violin.
