Al-Ahram Weekly 25 Nov. - 1 Dec. 1999 Issue No. 457
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Closing the gardens of the sun By David Blake photo: Sherif Sonbol Donizetti's Don Pasquale, Walid Aouni (Producer), Aldo Magnato (Chorus Master), Sherif Mohie El-Din (Conductor), Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 18 October

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Who offered this production to the Cairo Opera? Gifts often have a mystic habit of turning on the receiver. It is to be hoped this show does not take a further bite out of the limited resources of the Cairo Opera. After all, this Don Pasquale is likely to be the last opera show in the house of this departing century.

Everyone is vociferous as to its great comic appeal but there are many who find it a bore, held upright by only a few nice tunes. It is a special show-case for bright edgy voices which are no longer found, even in Italy.

When this opera was given at the American University's Ewart Hall with the same cast and producer it was sunny, funny and new. Its transfer to the larger space of the Opera is neither. What was there was amusing and direct, simple and elemental. At the Opera it is snide, grey and flat and performed to a half empty house.

The entire enterprise has become ordinaire and commonplace.

It is little use comparing Rossini's comic Barber of Seville to Donnizetti. As Beethoven said, Rossini was incomparable -- the wit is in the music's bones. But there are no bones at all in Don Pasquale, just a few pretty tunes. It is little use to help the production along by offering it the deadly shirt of Nessus and saying it is political. This, above all in the last shady days of 1999, is hardly a strategy to drive people in droves to scream with laughter. There is nothing funny about a gun even if it is in a film.

The resident team at the Opera House have never been able to utilise its largesse much, except perhaps for Abdel-Moneim Kamel. Things are either cut down to look small or stretched out to look lost. The Pasquale at the Ewart Hall looked full of everything; nuns, nurses, army tents, old clothes, pots and pans and a cast of singers who all seemed alive to their roles. They made of them people, which of course even in a formal Pasquale they are not. They are ciphers. And in this production Pasquale got lost at the beginning and was never found again.

It is a quartet opera, quarto, trio, duo and solo. Who they are or where is beyond the libretto's needs? It is just a sort of singalong.

Walid Aouni set it in some place or other. All the army equipment, with the troops jazzing about in camouflage outfits, further removed the show from anywhere. Meet you somewhere, see you anywhere is, after all, even for a comic opera, no place at all.

In the AUC production Neveen Allouba gave one of her very best character performances. She gave a skit on Madelaine Kahn's unforgettable siren who gets strangled by the son of Frankenstein while belting out, "Ah sweet mystery of life, at last I found you". She had a crazy Marx Brothers non-sequitur quality and was lovably batty. At the Opera she rips off Norina as a not quite in her prime school mistress and then makes an alarming appearance as Bette Davis playing Queen Elizabeth in an Eighteenth Century white wig. But nothing was funny, only very, very spacious.

The most effective of the cast were the duo, Raouf Zaidan and Ashraf Seweilam as Pasquale. As everyone knows, Zaidan can sing, and far out of character, as he showed successfully in Tha•s. His diction is famous. But where was his voice on this night? And the words to go with it? Maybe tact intervened and he became a clown of silence.

As for the Pasquale of Ashraf Seweilam, he is a grand actor, witty and knowledgeable in the roles of the absurd. But apart from his looks and clothes, Pasquale was missing. The hero Ernesto was a last minute stand-in. Georges Wanis looked beefy enough but the voice was not. It seemed veiled, far away in another show, and there was no real reason for Norina to fall on him as her choice of husband when the supposed oldster looked much more dishy.

Aldo Magnato's chorus was a bonus. They got around with speed and some lights flashing. But where was Aouni's flair? Perhaps it was left behind at the AUC. And who swallowed the Don?

Musical Bouquet (USA), Valerie de Casas (Director), Cairo Opera House, Small Hall, 16 November

If in your musical travels you have fallen under the spell of the Italian and German styles but, as so often happens, have not met with the French, then the concert given by the Valerie de Casas bouquet group may begin a passion. At its centre lay two compositions by French composers that show the French style in all its splendour.

The starting point of the concert was Handel's aria Art thou troubled from his opera Rodelinda which, like Schubert's song An Die Musik, tells of the mystical powers of music. Then came Mozart's Alleluia, which has the same atmosphere as Handel's. Both these songs, sung by Valerie de Casas, are difficult. The golden age of spectacular coloratura makes spectacular demands which must never show in performance.

De Casas, whether you like the special timbre of her voice or not, is very well schooled. And it shows.

The Handel has intervals, which she overcame, and decorative passages which must be done full speed. But the soprano showed that a slower speed suits the rhythm of this particular musical era. It sounds more exciting than just misty runs. Each note of the scale must be individual yet bound to the rest -- a rope of pearls, they used to be called. In the Mozart the pearls have to be more rapid, which she also did. Her pearls are real, not simulated.

Then came Samir Bayoumi Mansour, in two Chopin etudes. Mansour was a pupil of the Russian professor Demidov whose stay here produced a crop of very interesting pupils. Samir was one such and the sudden departure of Demidov to Russia sent them into an emotional spin. This happens. Young pianists need support, not dominance, and it was support that Demidov provided. The piano, being a perilous monster, capricious and wayward, needs a very special master-pupil rapport. And this once rather bereft pupil is now on track again.

He is special. He is big. He has a full, effortless tone which develops organ-like depths. Such players are loners, rogue elephants, but they need super confidence to play the huge things demanded of them. In this brief display of Chopin the organ tone erupted -- bronze, dark and threatening. It is thrilling but not at all suited to the music. It is to be hoped the player knows how to cope with the largesse that fate has bestowed upon him.

And then came the French display. It is a pity de Casas did not sing them with a full orchestra, but Greig Martin is nowhere an accompanist, he is a fellow worker. She sang the Colibri (the humming bird) of Chausson, one of the best French songs ever written -- equalling Schubert. But French is one of the most difficult languages in which to sing. It is ironic, a small, dazzling bird that, because of its love for effervescent love, eventually dies. It is a trial to the singer. De Casas was truly inspired.

The same feeling went into the aria Depuis de jour from Charpentier's opera Louise. It is a love story, an ordinary country girl brought to dazzling life by Paris, the city of light as it was. Selfish, demanding, she leaves home and family, flies out the windows of night to hurl herself into the turbulence of Parisian life. The scene is very French in style and totally demanding. It is supposed that you must not scream Louise. De Casas floated the inspired vulnerability of the girl with realism. This child was stripping herself bare before a love she had no power to resist.

Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Moushira Issa (Solo Piano), Jerzy Salwarowski (Conductor), Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 20 November

This was rather more than a simple concert. It was an event far removed from the ordinarily expected. Hurricane Issa was on display in the spaces of the Opera working with Salwarowski on the Rachmaninov Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.2 in C minor op.18.

Before this was Glinka's overture to his opera Russlan and Ludmilla, a singspiel of war and frenzy.

The orchestra was large, and sounded so. Salwarowski hurries on, rock-like and with a small gesture unleashes a whirlwind. Then it settled but the pistol crack of the opening had done its job. The large audience was stirred if not shaken. The full theatre was tense. The show we were to see promised some great things.

And then she came, Issa, very quietly, in elegant habit, looking a trifle monkish. She bows and takes her seat at the instrument, doing the usual pianist wriggle to get comfortable and like a true worker, unceremoniously rolls back the sleeves of her dress. No fuss. She is deadly serious getting her feet usefully placed because the feet play a part, a large part, in her performance. And then quietly begins the solo chords which open the work.

Issa in Tchaikovsky is a mother figure. But in this concerto she is a fury, something that has flown from the feet of the gods. She is no mother. she need not be human. She is a sort of bone-like spirit of music which is, after all, what we have come to listen to.

The repeated chords increase in density and then suddenly the tumult begins. Rachmaninov was a huge person, a piano himself but with two legs and large hangman's hands. This music is macho, bull-ring stuff -- there is battle, glory, death and the adulation of the mob. Why do women love to want to play it? The struggle? The unequal facing up to the impossible? After all men do exist as creatures, whether they be simple chaps, cads, angels or comforters. Who, I ask, picks me up in the Cairo street mob when I am knocked down? Always a man. One day I will go down for good and it will be a man that carries me away. Men save you and grave you.

At the piano Rachmaninov was God. What is Issa doing amongst all this? She is an angel. She picks you up. She is a fake in as much as she looks frail but carries the armour of a tank. An implement of music. Some musicians are possessed. Edwin Fischer was. Some women pianists also are possessed. Annie Fischer was and so is Issa. Music speaks from these people like oracles. Her music-making poses questions. She is very honest. Do not play around with her as a listener. You have come to listen so you might as well do it. She, in her generosity, is doing her best. And it is some best.

What energy, courage and dementia flow from her. She flies through the colossal arcs of sounds demanded by the composer, stamps and at times, in dealing with Salwarowski's oceanic waves, rises to her two feet, almost standing, and delivers chords and bounces back. It is shamelessly gorgeous music, like the rape paintings of Titian -- shamelessly erotic, no holds barred. Issa has a triumph. She is easy. And apparently well-mannered enough to cope with the fuss they are making of her.

In the concerto and the following Eroica symphony No 3 of Beethoven Salwarowski and the entire Cairo Symphony Orchestra were all totally into and generously delivering their music.

All we get of the conductor is his message and his back. But we saw the faces of the players on this night. They were genuinely enlightened, each and every one. We were a privileged crowd to receive such a performance.

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