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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 30 March - 5 April 2000 Issue No. 475
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Naked, savage, softly lit
By David Blake
Auer Quartet and Ramzi Yassa concert, Cairo Opera House, Small Hall, 20 March
An astounding concert by the Auer Quartet of Budapest. Young, electric and as colourful as the windows of Tiffany or Harrods at Christmas.
Underwater flashes from a tropical coral reef as everything pulses by in a dazzle of brilliant soft tones. Then, suddenly, Mr King Fish himself, Béla Bartók, cruises into view.
In this quartet, number one in a list of six, Bartók is at his most coruscating. He is never still, never afraid to shock. He is like a great fish, a kind of hedgehog exuding spiky jewels in the tropical glare to dazzle and allure. And this is only a quartet, not an 80 piece orchestra. A quartet, of course, can do anything if it is good enough and the players are primed for instant action. What is more, this is a good one.
So the great fish peers through the movements. The scene does not appear watery, but the lights are carefully arranged in a display to astound and allure. Bartók is a wizard whose poison is not lethal. If the prickly fish stings you it is nothing more than an intimation of a forthcoming eruption of greater beauty. Bartók is beautiful.
Tempo -- it is like wrapping up a diamond studded evening dress and throwing it to the passing current. Rhythm -- bits of Zigeuner waltz and road traffic noises of great beauty flash past the ears of the listener. These sounds are an especial explosion from the great Viennese bonfire of Schoenberg et al. And the Bartók six are unique, even to him. His musical mix is dazzling. You have to be on his beam. There is no time for pause.
Exhausting? No, it is like getting caught in a Cairo traffic pudding and getting out before you are swallowed. All this display of tonal colour, fresh from the bonfire, is only surpassed by Wagner in its frightening intensity.
Bartók splashes his colours and tones about like Jackson Pollock. But as the blaze of this quartet rushes on its way it is best to remember that it is old music. It was written in 1908. Yet still there are glorious, technicolor explosions, and beneath the reef of gleaming water. And then comes the turnoff. Bartók puts out the lights, switches off the power and New York goes black. Someone has run out of something primal. It is the great darkness but deep in the bowels of the quartet comes the sound of the aftermath. Naked savages, they used to be called, playing on rusty metal, burnt tree trunks, rusted matter.
The traffic has gone, the blaze splatters mud. Then comes the cello. Bartók has reinvented the cello in these quartets. These visions have given it a new voice -- auspicious danger and the terrors of uncertainty. He is a geometrician having a breakdown, but the geometry still adds up. After war and storm comes peace. Both are builders, as Heraclitus said. And so there is plenty left for the on going voyage.
Each player is one and a couple more. You hear a quartet bursting its sides and becoming like the Budapest Philharmonic. Tissues of light and power, minute, disappear over the horizon, then burst into splendour quantum-like.
Kurtàg was an overture -- Mozart, even Amadeus, a sort of requiem. To give Mozart after Bartók's quartet is hardly diplomatic. The strings sounded glare-tired and even the metal and brilliance of Ramzi Yassa's fingers, his effortless overdrive and runs like liquid fire to a break neck time, sounded emotionally drained. But all this fell short of the laconic furies of Bartók. Though what a concert. Obeisance to everyone concerned.
Cairo Opera Ballet Company, Cologne Philharmonic Choir, Cairo Opera Orchestra, Horst Meinardus (Choir Master), Mustafa Nagui and Sherif Mohieddin (Conductors), Abdel-Moneim Kamel (Director), Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 23 March
The Cairo Opera Ballet "summer flowers"; Béla Bartók (Below)
photo: Sherif Sonbol
This is the best Burana of recent times in Cairo. They have kept more of the script -- a re-shape of Roman elegies in the style of Propertius. There is not so much booze or roister, but it is grander and more dignified, sadder, more moving.
Everyone knows Orff's tunes. They are very good and treated in this more stately way, they gain. It used to be a noisy show, now it is musical.
First came the Cologne Philharmonic Choir, which is immense and fills the opera house with wonderful singing. The testing high tessitura was silver and gold and the lows, dark and threatening. Every aspect of the music, the seasons, the venues -- dramatic or romantic -- were filled with autumnal regret. They were warm and comforting and not, as so often, brazen and metallic.
Abdel-Moneim and Erminia Kamel had tidied up former productions. The décor remains the same, the lighting is expressive and suggests what is being sung.
The Cairo Opera Ballet Company performs with style and the dancing, repetitious as it is sometimes, has been made more anecdotal, with a breath of a new age pounding away at the old. Folkhevskaya, Erminia Kamel, Nelly and Dimitri all take turns at sharing the leading roles but it is more a symphonic ballet, constantly displaying the entire team. There are no stars. It is the Cairo Opera Company which delivers the final elegiac suggestion. Like the Rosenkavalier, time is a wondrous, destructive thing, even memory is ruined and dream is the result.
The singers, Thomas Heyer (tenor), Burkhard Zass (Bass), fit perfectly. The surprise of the entire show is the beautiful, young Korean soprano, Dong--Hi Yi. She is a warm and radiantly velvet lyric soprano of limitless range and her singing was the jewel of the ballet. Sadly she goes next stop to La Scala, Milan, to sing Bellini's Juliet. Would it were here -- the Cairo stage is already hers.
The Cairo Opera Orchestra under Mustafa Nagui surpassed itself. No barrel-house racket. Maybe Ernst Kovacic's visit has borne fruit.
The male element of the ballet gets more to do than formerly -- and about time. They danced the difficult lifts with authority and courage. This company needs men as well as pretty girls if it is to keep its place as a serious ballet troupe.
Prince Igor followed this stately ode. It is an interlude of an opera of blood and terror. Borodin's splendour does show in these dances but they were performed by Sahar Helmy and Dimitri, and the full opera corps, to look resplendent, and that was the trouble. Everyone was dressed up as if to a court ball, the colours glowing, the costumes like lines of summer flowers. But nowhere was the savage Tartar court ever suggested. No hairy-chested brutes flying through the air like spinning tops and no insolent slave girls to enslave them. It looked rather nice, rather TV, but the Borodinial passion was not there. Too neat, clean and well behaved.
At the last Bolero, of who else -- Ravel. There was never more than one Bolero. "Thank God", Ravel is supposed to have said. However, it put him up into the top ten lists for the rest of his life. In this show, as with Burana, Abdel-Moneim and Erminia Kamel have done a dust up job on the idea. It is still a circle of male bulls in black stretch pants with a female figure, only one, aloft in a daze, brightly lit, doing operatic, erotic body swivels as she revolves and sways. This is the night-club part of it. But the Kamels have done more. What evolves is a poem, an erotic nightmare; savage, ambiguous, very close to Bejard's original ballet for Maina Gielgud.
Vera Krapevko, like a spider in her web, was a smash hit. Her arms wave, weave and lash. Her long legs, like flagellation ropes, seem to go on forever. She rocked back and forth like a preying mantis who finally makes the lethal spring. She then folds up like a poisoned insect who has taken a bite out of herself.
Pandemonium in the crowd. Ravel may have hated it but it still gets an audience.
