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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 June 1999 Issue No. 433
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Features Books Living Travel Sports Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Linger longer, Lobo
By David BlakeCairo Symphony Orchestra; soloists Abdel-Hamid El-Shweikh (violin) and Dorin Matea (viola); conductor José Ferreira-Lobo; Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 5 May
Cairo has just heard I Solisti Veneti on the fast racing circuit. Could an orchestra play quicker? Yes -- the Cairo Symphony Orchestra did, under its visiting Portuguese director José Ferreira-Lobo, here sadly on a one-night stand.
Programme-wise, this concert had a strange look -- routine Mozart, intermission split, then a set of seven Iberian pieces.
This being the summer solstice of the Cairo madhouse, 5 June imtihanat (school exams), cleansing of the Opera House looming, departure cancellations and sudden surprises -- what would be in store for us, a record small audience gathering in the Opera House on this, the eve of the great migration? We were left in no doubt.
The Mozart Figaro overture, survivor of all exterminations, political, musical and social, opened the concert. No worries, because it went off with a crack like a street bomb -- shock tactics not usual for Mozart. All the age-old bouquets of notes and flowery sprays of sound were there, could be heard. Nothing was fudged in spite of the suicide of the metronome.
Every little thing in the visiting card of the overture was highlighted and at a speed with which nothing but the ear could cope. We heard, we did not see. Was this Figaro? Where in the melée was the tiny man in the flowered waistcoat who wrote it?
Everything went round in a mass of wheels, a dynamo cloth-weaving factory whizzing and whirring, spinning out cloth of gold, cotton or air-spun dreams too beautiful to last till tomorrow. We were taken into the creation factory of Mozart's music itself, almost horrifying, yet all there is of memory.
The overture was exhausting. It crackled to a finish, by this time a compact mass, something which happens when planets shrink into carbon balls stuck with diamonds. A load of energy. What would Lobo do with the opera if this was the overture? Probably what he did with the next item on the programme, the Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat Major for Violin, Viola and Orchestra K. 364.
Speed abated, we were no longer eavesdropping at bedroom doors or listening to the suprasexual chatter of frivolous, worthless aristocrats. We were at the Halls of Sonority, some place near where the magic flute had its resting place, with no flute but a violin and a viola to fill the frontal spaces of the work. This became another memory feat -- what this concertante was before, in almost any place where fine music is made, was not what was done with it in this one.
With Mozart you need a good strong digestion. He can be delivered, as he mostly is, in court dress -- or in street slouch. Neither version was presented at this programme. Lobo presented the genuine Mozart, he who expects you always to pay the check. There are no free performances. Listeners and player must work to get the message across. Lobo was of this mind. He and his working orchestra of the moment slaved through a hot sticky night to honestly deliver this piece, and this time with the help of two really great string masters Lobo put it across.
El-Shweikh, Russian trained at the Cairo Conservatoire, now resident of Geneva, studied with Professor Romano. He is now the leader of the Swiss Symphony Orchestra and has a style, stern, rather aloof and fastidious but majestic. His view is broad and filled with that special quality the violin possesses -- a sense of risk. Nothing is certain, this violin might explode at any moment. So his playing has the force of a survivor.
Dorin Matea is from Romania, and plays with the Swiss Romande. His voice has a soft dark tone, but never cloys, and he made a foil to El-Shweikh. As for Lobo, when this piece began, one of Mozart's most lovable, he paused not, nor hestitated, but gave the grand roles from the orchestra their full time and space -- and darkness. The words in the score, allegro maestoso, directed the performance. Mozart loved the key of E-flat major. He plays with it like a conjuror, and so does this conductor.
The two violins are not supposed to be frisky. This is music with a mystery. Heard when you are young, it is visual. The fiddles are birds -- sea or land, echo or narcissus. Souls? Unlikely. Mozart left the soul alone because he was the soul of music. And it is here that Lobo, his two players, and the Cairo Symphony Orchestra gave a performance so majestic, elevated and free it could not have been bettered anywhere in the world of music.
The world loves to dethrone its geniuses -- dark ages, dark practices. Mozart and his smutty letters and soiled underwear are all become part of the anguish of the divinely gifted in their life and apparently in their death.
Lobo softened his speed, turned down his pressures and by the last movement let the orchestra go full out but, with the sleight of hand some lovely conductors have, he allowed his two fiddles to answer all the questions about souls, birds and echoes with the music itself.
After the Mozart, the concert was part of a musical hi-jack to somewhere in Iberia. Where -- it seemed not important. There was no de Falla, no Portugese folk songs, but it began with a dark and glowering ostinato by Fernando Lapa. Distant thunder, a whiff of Flamenco showing in the orchestra, and then a song by de Lacerda called Almouroi, which began as a gentle love song then grew and spread until it became a battle piece, with trumpet Spanish themes, dusty and ancient. This was Iberia in the open air.
Then came a piece by Brago Santos, memories of Carmen. We missed her, but she had gone over the mountain with the bull and was in some place far from Seville.
The fifth song, by Manuel Faria, resembled some of the Spanish greats -- tone, orchestral effects. Lobo was into speed. The evening had become a dance. The music throbbed, bashed and hurtled along. It was a city fiesta. The orchestra did marvels. The strings were not sitting on their chairs, they were half air borne as their feat thumped out the rhythms, insistent and mad.
Would the first violin take to the air? Almost. Lobo, the instigator of the entire cabaret, remained calm, with a fanatic domination of the faces. The two last pieces, about someone called Louis Alonzo, could not grow faster or it would burst into pieces. Arms flew, the dance whirled on, ollé -- ollé, and it all came to crash end. But nothing fatal. Merely fiesta.
