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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 May - 2 June 1999 Issue No. 431
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Living Features Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Mad about the Muse
By David Blake
Pichon's production of Thais
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Thais, by Jules Massenet; producer Jean-Louis Pichon; decor Alexandre Heyroud; Cairo Opera Orchestra, conductor Mustafa Nagui; Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 22 May
The coin comes up flip side, so Thais sets out on her tramp to God. She never really goes anywhere, but always ends up in heaven, stopping, of course, in Alexandria during its most golden age of decadence.
Thais of the opera is not mad, but Massenet was about his vocal muse -- the long-legged Sanderson. Legend has it that her voice had no colour but plenty of electric power at the top. It was lights full on when she started to sing, and she never made a false landing. It was that sort of a voice, up and out like a rocket.
Iman Mustafa, Cairo's very own Thais, is courageous to sing four performances in a row, even with rest days between, because it is a physical and emotional feat to do it at all.
Thais is a transparent, mellifluous, simple opera. A sleep-around, youngish beauty from Alexandria's chic demimonde falls in love with an irascible monk called Athanail, who wants her salvation if only so as to secure his own physical needs. Thais bypasses her monk and heads instead to God. That is that. The monk is left to repent, surging around in a world of flesh and fast cars.
The music of Thais is of great subtlety and physical beauty -- so much so it becomes boring, so many major-key resolutions and endless spun-out melismas. But it has genius of sorts, and is suggestive of elegiac love, despair and salvation. And if the salvation appears to get in the way of the opera, it is only because this aspect of life is so out of fashion. We are so deep into damnation, penetration and explosion that Thais can be a bore to a TV-serial fed audience. The opera comes from an age when Paris was the centre of the world. It has the stamp of total conviction and assurance, so it needs the kind of performance by singing actors who are just not around any more.
Iman Mustafa is exceptionally honest in presenting the butterfly nun. She never makes wrong beginnings and copes heroically with the fiendish high tessitura of the part, and in the quiet reflective pathos of the story she is at her best. But Thais needs a dramatic soprano possessed of the kind of voice that appears to be no longer possible in our age of pollution.
When the palace of Thais is burned by incendiaries she and her monk take to the desert. And it is here that we had the best surprise of the evening. Mustafa Nagui is not the conductor one automatically associates with such carefully composed, such very French and immaculately surfaced music. Yet in the pathetic desert scenes between the two lost souls Nagui began to draw from the orchestra soft tissues of sound which were irresistibly sensuous and opulently shining.
The opera took off into a slow-moving meditational story. Athanail, the baritonal antihero of the start, became the tender, caring saint of the sad ending. Evgenij Demerdjiev repeated his last year's performance and sang even better. Hassan Kami acted a generous Nicias who sang bright carrying climaxes through the huge build up to the end of the incendiary finish of the second act. His sacrifice of Thais to her destiny was a light shrug to a force majeur. Palemon, Holy Father, Abdel-Wahab El-Sayed, and Holy Mother Albine, Hanan Guindi, were signposts along Thais's desert track to eternity, and were quietly assuring.
But is the end so comforting? Massenet, besotted by the sounds of his muse's voice, gives Thais a noisy death, far up among the high Cs, when everything calls for a quieter passing. But for Massenet she expires in an attack of blissful high notes, whilst the monk is left in despair to enjoy the ravages of the flesh.
Mustafa Nagui did his best with Massenet's errors of judgment. Thais goes out into the happy fields like Joan of Arc to battle, not on a beautiful sigh of resignation. Salvation gets a rough passage these days but this production kept the opera's dignity and a flow of refreshing, comforting music, almost as if we were in an impressionistic garden. One missed the ultimate decadence of Alexandria.
20th century Hungarian Chamber music; Gomhouria Theatre, 20 May
There is a lot of a particular black in Hungarian music -- the kind of black that is time-worn red. And black is what we had in this fascinating concert. It was a showing of reverse movements. What we might have expected we never had, and what we had was sheer excitement. Sounds and colours crop up from everywhere. A gap, a jolt, and then there were some more sounds of intrigue and transgression in the air.
These days listeners put up with awful areas of classic repetition -- same phrases, same run ups and downs, same resolutions. The classy classics have got all jammed up. This concert just laid what it had to do flat and straight before its audience. And a lot of the classic jam just trickled away into space, leaving us with some fresh sounds.
The programme was well thought out, adequate and true to its intentions with but one thing missing -- just a little more of the solo piano music of Bartok, Kurtag or anyone else, played by the visiting pianist of the evening, Gabor Csalog.
From what we heard -- a single solo and accompaniments to Maria Horvath (soprano) and Csaba Klenan (clarinet) -- Csalog is the latest in a line of astounding pianists from the Liszt Academy of Budapest. He is a master of delicacy, power, speed and depth of emotive penetration, and all without fuss or flounce.
And so the concert was called Chamber Music. Some chamber -- more like the elaborate vastness of the sleeping quarters of the Countess in Tchaikovsky's Pique Dame. It began with three folk songs (piano and clarinet) of Bartok, strange apparitions, a float in historic time and we, the listeners, were there in some sort of immediate Zigeuner-like atmosphere, full of menace, joys and pleasures all done with the most horrific brevity.
Then came the voice and a piano piece called Epigram by Kodaly, and here a tune appeared, one of those Hungarian hanging garden memories full of soul and tears. It spouted up, this memory, these echoes of past dramas full of lilt and sway, reverberating through one of those great Hungarian musical spaces which sets the world dancing. But it subsided and the voice took over. Maria Horvath has a Hungarian voice -- mezzo then soprano, fixed to a richly metallic low tone. Usually sopranos disappear at the low-tone take over. She did not, producing a dramatic, often sensuous sound.
Then came a ballad for clarinet and piano. This was the beginning of the black Hungarian music, followed by eight Hungarian folk songs for voice and soprano. These pieces, as well as the remainder of the programme, were nocturnal, membranous and full of threat, richly coloured, metamorphosed by time to daring caprice. The singer kept leaving and returning, each time dressed in another costume of black and brown colour. The lights were dim, the music dusky, shot through by pistol cracks and bullet traceries from the piano.
The blobs of excreta flew past in the gloom. No earthly sun ever shone on this landscape, but beautiful it was, black blood pauses of electric silence, all part of the awful embroidery of the 20th century. There seemed to be a small, mischievous asteroid far up above in the ceiling of the Opera House playing tricks our earthly consciousness only partly understood.
Like a Jamesian golden bowl dropped onto stone this music cracks into countless pieces. There is panic, dispersal, blood and death and then, lightly, surprisingly, it all coheres into a single thing, and the miracle -- survival -- has come once again.
This is the message of Hungarian music. What followed was high spirits -- three small, haiku-like poems for voice and piano, soft and disturbing, much weight squeezed into tiny spaces.
The little songs were radioactive. Then the clarinet had its solo. The instrument chattered and fluttered as it disappeared after each uncertain page. It finally disappeared forever, like running water into a dark hole. Adios the clarinet. Then came the concert's greatest friend, the piano, in a thing called Plays by Gyorgy Kurtag. There is so much noise around that a segment of silence from the piano is a kind of peaceful miracle. So the brief fragmented pieces were performed, small sparks with big intent, embedded in black silence.
Adam Kondor wrote small pieces called Singing Exercises for solo voice, almost spoken in elongated social whispers. They zoom back and forth from the Baroque to the dead beat until the clarinet alone rose into a cappriccio homage to Bach.
Which means it's okay. In all this gloom there is always the old man with his fugues and organ. The concert ended with a Hungarian capriccio for piano and clarinet. This was not a Liszt send-up, not a stoned rhapsody. Liszt had gone to God and respectability by then. This was more a letter addressed to someone lost in The Empire Fights Back.
