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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 29 June - 5 July 2000 Issue No. 488
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters L'homme sans slip
By David Blake
Cairo Symphony Orchestra, soloist Yekaterina Lebedeva (piano), conductor Moustafa Nagui, Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 24 June
Shostakowitch did everything the wicked empire told him to do. Tear up your music. He did. Stand in the corner and say you're sorry. He did. He was very honest and -- a genius at orchestral composition. He even knew how to laugh, but laughing was forbidden in the empire. He had to fit a pattern. Stand down, pull everything off, until you're starkers. He threw away his slip, no underpants for the wicked empire. In the end they turned him grey. He had a grey, bruised heart, and his music went grey with him.
But there was that greatness of spirit about him, neither he nor they could get rid of. It stuck to him as did his music, which now sounds like a long e-mail from another age -- once called the Cold War.
Cold wars are not the best compost from which to make great music, but he did his best, and this eighth symphony is one of the most symptomatic of his works. The good and the great both shine through from time to time. He was too gifted, too honest not to know the basis upon his life and work rested.
This is Russia. Russia is like Egypt, it can be troubled, tormented, but it has the power of staying. Both are immortal, and into this immortal Russia Shostakowitch plunged deep down, fearless, ignoring as far as possible the floating refuse that makes up political time. What he surfaced with is often shocking, boringly repetitive and plain dull. But there comes a time when the immortal Russia sails past us like a great awesome iceberg, most of it below surface. They can sink things, tear them apart.
All this Moustafa Nagui did his absolute best to achieve. As a conductor he is best at a challenge. In the more ordinary, run-of-the-mill stuff that by force makes up a lot of the repertoire he conducts, he passes it over -- loud soft, quick slow. He loves Dvorjak and Tchaikovsky, and at times he'll amaze you with sudden lights and fires of authority in opera and ballet. But things which arouse his special attention are the far out, way beyond music, especially Russian.
Moustafa Nagui is Signor Sonor. He loves tone, pianissimos to inaudible extremes, or fortissimi of tropical-storm dimensions, the deeper, richer, more bronze the better. At times he approaches the thunder of the organ, and whatever he is, he is not small.
There was plenty of scope for tone in this concert, from the opening piece, the Tchaikovsky Capriccio "Italiano" for full orchestra which is usually played scherzo -- but not for Nagui. He went for bronze with shadows. Tchaikovsky himself seemed to prefer silver, but bronze we had.
The brass of the orchestra had a ball to themselves, and they played perfectly steady, dead centre, all the beautiful build ups in which Nagui encouraged them. Trumpets blared, horns brayed, it sounded like Napoleon's attack on Moscow, with no hint of Italy. And then, at the end, the national songs of Italy were trotted out one by one, finishing with the Tarantella.
Here the conductor let the piece go to the winds and we had speed. It whirled along with some colour and nuance of Liszt. So Moscow stayed in the snow, while we were somewhere on the sublime blue coast below Naples. The next event was the first year of Alfred Schnittke's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. It is of enormous difficulty to perform for soloist and orchestra. Being Russian, Schnittke leans heavily on Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, with strange errant passages suggesting Scriabin.
Everything about this concerto is original for the piano alone, meditating, destructive, epileptic thoughts which disappear as the mind wanders on, and the whole thing sinks into romantic gestures which end in dead silence, suggesting nothing. Then the piano starts again. The orchestra in this concerto is a more than important presence, more than a friend. It is a completely different entity to the piano, billowing away in major keys while the piano broods in no key at all, in deepest Viennese twelve tones.
Lebedeva, the player, was equal to all its caprices. She fumed, pouted, then went wild, suicidal, like a pianistic session with Heisenberg. Lebedeva was frightening, the sounds and the awkward personality of the piano became part of her. It seemed to defy everything, this piano -- Nagui, the orchestra and the player. Lebedeva seemed to be no player at all. She sounded out of time in a different tone world of her own special making, and all this from the piano in front of her.
This young player performed a feat a personal displacement, unique. She's Russian, but like many before her she's taken to London. She lives there and plays at St George's Hanover Square, and all the other festivals as well as the proms. To hear her do this work with an approving and indulgent conductor like Nagui, both locked in the same closet, hardly any depth between them in which the mood was a grand and exalted end to the concert season, due to begin again next October. May she please come again, with the same conductor and orchestra, to do the Ligeti concerto, Schoenberg or Eliot Carter. Such music making is what the opera house needs, and after a short time there will be no need to wonder where the audience was. The concert ended with the mammoth Symphony no.8 of again Shostakowitch. He did say that this work represents happiness and great hopes for the future. This sounds impossible, unless by 1943 he had begun to live in illusions as escape from the facts of the present. Listening carefully to Nagui's rendition of the simplicity, honesty and penetration of this disturbing work, it suggests Shostakowitch must by the time of writing this had sunk into a sort of catatonic Slumber Land of exhaustion at the sheer weight of doing it. It is exhausting to listen to it as vast folds of sound flow over and into each other, end upon end with no hope of consummation.
Nagui was a good guide. We followed him easily through the mind-scapes, the storms and becalments, but at the repetitions one's interest begins to fade away. There are just too much, the longeur spreads out around us. How grey the soul, there is no suggestion of colour. Everyone's dead, it's insect land. But Shostakowitch remains a great composer, a giant. There are all the other things he has given, but the symphonies often suggest self hypnosis. He has put himself off in his own private fix. Sad that this is not ours too.
