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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Anybody seen Elsa?
By David Blake
Song Recital, Tahia Shams El-Din (Soprano), Mohamed Shams El-Din (Piano), Cairo Opera House, Small Hall, 15 March
Opera singers are usually beings of two elements -- what they are and what they want to be. Reality and dream. If lightweight, they want heavy drama. Sopranos are notorious -- if light lyric they dream of singing Aida or Tosca.
This interesting recital turned the tables on dreams. Tahia Shams El-Din comes on stage, accompanist Mohamed, a boy of 15, in tow. She is tall, well dressed in black, her build middle-weight. She is no Giselle but a strong, shapely, athletic tennis champ.
She begins to sing Rosina, the pert, cheeky, boring minx from Rossini's The Barber of Seville.
Shams is no mezzo, but a bright, lyrico-dramatic soprano, almost a spinta but for the fact that her voice is too bright as yet for such roles as the Verdi Desdemona. She is uncomplicated, matter of fact and no nonsense with her presentations. She stands and delivers. It is out of date, but then so are strong, bright sopranos. In fact, except for the very, very few, they are practically extinct. So she can afford to place it straight on the table before an audience. Audiences love voice, she has one so why not share it?
Rosina is quite outclassed. Instead of minx, we had a powerful virago in rather a bad temper -- rather as Maria Callas did it, with plenty of clip on the consonants. Her next part in the programme was Oscar, doing one of the page's arias from Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschero. It is a small masterpiece, permitting the light soprano a chance for irony and insolence with a catchy, light operetta-like accompaniment.
The boy really knows which of the masked dancers is the king the villains are about to assassinate. It is a sort of Viennese Johann Strauss effect with a deadly centre provided by Verdi and always a hit piece for the light soprano star of the opera.
Tahia Shams El-Din
She was giving a concert so she concertised the whole situation. She stood and delivered plain. The young accompanist Mohamed Shams El-Din bounced it along a shade smarter than was necessary. The soprano was there with all the notes but her voice is now too large for this sort of thing and she slurred phrases and held up the drive. At the high climax, the Small Hall had a few high passages which it cannot accommodate comfortably and Tahia began the first of a line of situations that was to the pattern of her concert.
Due to no fault of her own, but to nature's bounty, she was too big for the hall. This voice needs space in which to manipulate. After this -- pat on -- we had of all things Gilda from Rigoletto and her show piece from the disreputable drama which is one of classic opera's great pinnacles. The thigh-slapping, slaverous prince rigged up as a poor student chases Gilda in one of his night cruises. She falls for him but dad takes her home and locks her in the garden and to the inclement night air she softly breezes the name of her lover, Caro nome. It is a long, elegiac melody, truly felt by the duped heroine, full of trills and delicate coloratura.
What the audience had was a repeat. Power, and enough for Bellini's Norma. Exciting fireworks, leaps and long-held notes for a full dramatic soprano. She left the long diminuendo trill at the end.
And again, Gounod's dramatic aria from Romeo and Juliet. She is happy. She waltzes around over the volcano which is to come, destroying the lovers. The song has irony, joy and the aura that comes of Gounod's genius for place.
The soprano really tried her best in this aria to tone down her voice, but when she tried to restrain it, it burst out with generosity and colour. No use. The voice itself is of the size of Gounod's Marguerite from his Faust opera -- a great dramatic heroine. Poor Juliet was wiped out.
Tahia was more the Elsa of Wagner's Löhengrin than Juliet or Gilda. These roles suit another budding Egyptian Soprano, Amira Selim, more than Tahia.
In the first part of the concert the pianist accompanist and soloist was Mohamed Shams El-Din. His performance was original. Recently he played Rachmaninov's Paganini Variations with speed and feeling and these he applied to his work as accompanist. He sometimes doubled her tempos. And then as soloist he played Rachmaninov's wonderful Vocalise for solo piano. It was a revelation. He is so young, so full of desire to achieve that the playing he provided for the wearing, almost dissolute beauty of the Rachmaninov poem was an unexpected bonus in the concert. It was a joy how he managed the long, dying fall and its decadent late resignation. One more proof that there is another pianist of possession in Cairo. He followed this with a Prokofiev Satanic Apparition. Again, more possession, almost Listzian when his playing reached grandiose proportions.
The second half of this night's unveiling of an interesting lyric singer, shining away in the wrong repertoire, was Shams El-Din's song from La Bohème telling her new friend who she was. In the telling of it there was no narrative at all. The rapid parlando of Puccini is not for her. She went for a slower density, of a forthright aria of explanation without a hint of the necessary superficiality of Mimi which causes the tragedy. She was Tosca in the first act, but authority is not one of Mimi's gifts.
Better was the tragic end of Liu in Turandot, though the heroine herself was not far away. This aria did permit the singer a proper broadening of her tone and personality. The audience was climbing the steps up to some sort of vocal revelation -- Elsa, Elsa of Löhengrin If only she had done the dream she would have shown that, come as it must when Cairo takes a bash at Löhengrin, at least there is a resident Elsa to fill out the long, bland, gorgeous tunes.
Her last selection of songs were in Arabic. Three images from Ali Osman with words by Salah Abdel-Sabour and another song, Don't Depart , with words by Farouk Guweida. These songs set the balance with the blonde voice of Shams El-Din singing the shadowed music of Ali Osman. As with even Mozart, Arabic as a language sings well. It is close to opera, to high emotions and soft meditative melodies.
Gamal Abdel-Rahim's short piece, Breath Coming and Breath Going from The Daughter of the Sultan, showed the voice of the evening's soprano capable, at least in Arabic, of soft, high tones and sympathetic appeal.
Mohamed Shams El-Din, in this part of the concert, made a remarkable tour de force of two of Schubert's most riveting Lieder to Liszt's arrangement. Tahia should have sung them of course. The Gratchen am spinnrode was possessed by energy and complete dedication. He had been running back and forth, searching for missing song parts but the audience wanted him to succeed, to show 'em. In the playing of these two songs he did. Gratchen, Marguerite's heart-broken outburst from Faust rose to a climax of bitter resignation, and in the Erl König the atmosphere of the voices -- father, narrator and demon -- were all well differentiated. The atmosphere of persistent chase and terror were positively chilling. The young one was determined to impress and he did. The only thing that hindered a complete rendering was that in both songs Liszt kept Schubert's genius for ongoing rhythms which the pianist failed to do.
But the concert was a happy event. It showed a young soprano gifted with a truly thrilling voice ready to take on the big things -- she would make a perfect heroine in Charpentier's opera Louise. And as regards the young pianist, he has gifts of penetration and bravery beyond the ordinary.
