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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 13 - 19 January 2000 Issue No. 464
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Special Books Profile Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Dreams of a certain whiteness
By David Blake
Cairo Symphony Orchestra; works by Johann Strauss, conductor Ahmed El-Saedi; Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 8 January
Johann Strauss -- he of the Blue Danube
Symbolic syllables -- this concert nearly got lost. It lost its accustomed place at the top of the New Year celebrations, demoted this year on the back of the last gasps of the Eid to demonstrate some dangerous truths about music -- that there are no songs like the old songs for long-life expectancy. Nothing daunted, they just go on coming back regardless of what is coming in from other directions, things that temporarily at least appear to threaten their supremacy. This concert, in the course of the change, lost its plumes and flowers and High Viennese manner. There has always been nothing like a touch of Empire for the New Year's Eve celebrations, even if it is an operetta.
What it retained, however, was good old redoubtable Johann Strauss, and his sunny songs from the dream lands of the south. He, Saedi and the orchestra brought off between them a special personal and loving goodbye to one millennium, and for sure a warm welcome to the coming other.
All the old chestnuts in the bag were brought out. How could all this nostalgia for dead empires and lost kingdoms of love and desire work? Nothing was left out. The programme, not long, was exact in its accuracy. We got every good 3/4 waltz song ever written. The orchestra turned itself into a voice and every sort of vocal inflection -- low, intimate or schmaltzy -- was given its loving due. It was not a big audience, but never did the house respond so warmly to Dolci Pianti for Cello and Orchestra, gorgeously, almost slaverously delivered by Alexander Komachenco. If you thought you knew all about the Fata Morgana Polka, that enough was enough for one lifetime, Saedi and the orchestra showed us again new twists to the tunes. Fruehlingstimmen Walzer op. 410 ended the first half of the programme.
There is something about the old songs. They are still bigger business than the new -- bankable turns in the air drenched with tears, but not too many in the Strauss approach. His Hungarian leanings towards the dance always show, with the czardas in particular.
The second half brought the whole family, Johann and Josef and the Pizzicato Polk and, of course, Johann's son, he of the Blue Danube Strauss. There are no names for what this Strauss did for music, with his vitality and dauntless imagination. With the Blue Danube, three strikes alone are enough. The world's heart stops beating and then begins again when the sounds are transmuted into dance -- the waltz, which was never really dance anyway, anymore than its colour, which was never blue. It is beyond Mozart, Beethoven or even Brahms to weave a tune so irresistible, long focused and almost insanely fresh.
It has become the divine parent of all millennia sounds, as Stanley Kubrick discovered when he set it rolling into 2001. He moved the Blue Danube forever from any known place to which it had once belonged and cast it out into vast space where the huge rings of its rhythmic splendour could ripple into eternity. El-Saedi always gets his colours right, and like Kubrick sees the Danube as white -- no need for spectrum identity, just white; not bridal, floral or vegetable -- just abstract spacious white, no connotations.
Angels are supposed to be white. The Cairo Symphony Orchestra, on this night, went white and lovable, in harmony with the white colours around. White is a feel and experience of something on the sunny side; if they say you have a white voice, it's a compliment because white can never be anything else. Sometimes San Francisco Bay is white in the wind, as is the harbour of Sydney Australia -- white shot through with westerly blue, a colour fit for great white sharks to bathe in. As the concert hurried on and the Blue Danube was left behind, we went straight into the Radetzky March of op. 228 -- Strauss' father.
This music always means the end; it is terminal in its matter of fact way of showing the show's over. All this music was bright white music. What was left at the sides for darker moods was the heartbreak. Never admit you have a broken heart unless you are a big pop singer with a fine lyricist. Piaf, Garland -- Florence Mills wailing in the depths of night that she is a blackbird and will never be home ever tonight -- these songbirds are a terrible tribe of negativism for popular music to support, but strange to say it's the tears that cash the first and last the longest.
