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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Good ghosts don't die
By David Blake
Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Chamber Music IV, Cairo Opera House Small Hall, 23 December
From left: Alban Berg (1885-1935) and Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Good or bad, or just plain ugly horrible, musical ghosts hang around longer than any others. All of them have lasting propensities: well-made bones and bodies, and plenty of classical life-line to hang on to; there's no sinking a busy, tuneful ghost.
This brief concert, balanced on the very lip of the departing century, was a bountiful surprise of how to survive your own ghosthood -- you need friends, ideally like the four Russians from the Cairo Symphony Orchestra whose lucid playing as a quartet night could have salvaged even the most horrible ugly modern music. But this programme had no horrid mod music, only some ruminant Shostakovich which they played as if it was a clear azure dream not a KGB night visit.
The concert began with the Five Short Pieces for Quartet Opus 5 of the Viennese composer Anton von Webern, whose mysterious death in Bavaria in 1945 ended one of the finest and deepest musical minds of the century. He, Alben Berg and Schonberg became the three divinities of the new 20th-century musical stir-up. They did damage, made some horrible noises, but recharged the classical formula, knowing well that classics, so long as Bach was there, must survive everything. They reinvented him, and without changing a note of his music gave the new century a light-bridge to sail across.
How well Euro-America has availed itself of these inventions. A new arc may come when the new year begins, perhaps from Samoa, where the tunes and inventions move with the speed of fast-forward travel clocks.
Do people still actually listen to such music as early Webern? His early orchestral pieces are some of the most physically beautiful orchestral music written in the 20th century -- but these five, fidgety, darting Weberns were running down the scale like Amazonian rainforest sounds, drip drop, drip drop. Far up in the green heights of the jungle leaf cathedrals it's raining. Rain seldom penetrates the leaf layers -- just drops arrive.
The first of the five minute movements opens with conventional chords but soon goes irrational, space jumping like the water drops. The jumps spread out and become impossible to pin descriptions to. But this music had a huge influence and created controversy, all of which has extended into the libraries and archives of the musical times. It is not important which piece is which, two or five, they melt so fast into each other, deceiving even the ear's quickest receptions.
There comes a kind of shudder, maybe something lovely will happen, the tones relax, even the raindrops stop, it all clears away -- and farewell the five pieces.
Such concision was a virtue of Webern's not shared by Shostakovich. He liked rumination, repetition and deep saturation. He had everything: a gift for managing vast orchestras, and gifts of tone and visualisation shared by no one else of his time. And he could be Horrible Modern. He passed over all sound barriers with an ease only Stravinsky could equal, and still he could be horrible. This string quartet no. 8 in C minor, opus 110 is notorious. Some quartets hate it, all fear its endless dark inky blueblack colour and impenetrable gloom.
That is until heard by this team: Krassen Penev (first violin), Roman Svirlov (second violin), Alaa Khalil (viola) and Victoria Kapralova (cello). The way they dispatched the capricious airy Webern had not prepared the audience for what took place with the Shostakovich. As players in a quartet, they have reached that rarefied state where the understanding between each is intimate and yet relaxed.
At the first signs of coming danger in the music they cling together tightly, and their devotion is a wonder to hear. They hypnotised the audience. In five movements, and knowing this particular composer's dislike of concision, you can strap yourself down for a long boring haul -- gloomy, hopeless, the ink of despair dripping over everything.
But not with these four players. The endless chains of passages and corridors of the music were made to admit light shafts and moments of tenderness. Gone was Horrible Modern. Instead was a new expansive landscape, not heard before from the weird subterranean no 8 in C minor. It lifted the spirit, never casting us into the black pit usually waiting for us in Shostakovich's renderings of souls lost in the vortex.
Last came an early string quartet from Ahmed El-Saedi, resident conductor of Cairo Symphony Orchestra. We had ghosts, good and bad. This work shows Saedi is in a determined mood not to be Horrible Modern. Strange, but maybe a little bit of modern horror would have helped this quartet from sinking, as it often did, into banality. Everything in the work was well-composed, the layout simple and clear. What was wrong was the content. El-Saedi's orchestral pieces are often vivid and full of imagination as well as force. As a conductor of other people's music, his observation is as clear as a bell, but with his own work the vision seems to falter as with this quartet. It is not of the highest standard, and could have done without being included in a programme with Webern and Shostakovich.
Good ghosts never die, they say. El-Saedi is a good conductor, but certainly he has a long way to go before he becomes a good ghost.
