Al-Ahram Weekly 14 - 20 September 2000 Issue No. 499
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Not exactly gala

By David Blake

Cairo Symphony Orchestra; Beethoven Symphonies No 2 and 3; conductor Ahmed El-Saedi; Main Hall, Cairo Opera House, 9 September

A feeling of reunion did arise from the fairly small audience on the opening night of the new season, the scene of Ahmed El-Saedi's return. The hall looked sad. Maybe everyone is still away at the seaside enjoying a few last days of beach life before the beginning of the school year brings families stampeding back to the city.

So the audience was sparse for this otherwise highly-charged concert. El-Saedi explores a vast repertoire of music in his concerts, allowing certain aspects of his character to predominate. Drive, speed, energy -- these are all foregrounded. Like him or not, he is a force to be reckoned with. He can excite or depress, but always he registers. Expect anything except the non-commital, no-go performance.

All these qualities appeared in the performance of the two Beethoven symphonies nos 2 and 3. Their numbering on the long symphonic trip undertaken by Beethoven suggests brevity, youth and concision. Later age would spread itself. Yet in performance the later symphonies have grown younger and quicker, the first longer. These two are complex, capricious and questing. Questing is young, but their structure is surprisingly elderly. Schubert shares the angst of Beethoven. They seem a wild pair of brothers, and it is these two, rather than the avant garde of Vienna, who are the ones who created the music we live on today.

The opening of number two is exciting, like an explosion of colour at the fairground, and also unexpected. From beginning to end it quite lacked the classical structure usually given to it. Instead there was a romantic loosening of the formal elements, with bursts of colour in the upper reaches. Darker tonalities were to be reserved for No 3.

El-Saedi has deconstructed the classics before, but not to this extent. The entire orchestra, strings, brass and everything, sang out radiantly. The opening dance tune sounded like the marriage music of Mendelssohn. The entire symphony became a celebration of colour.

Eveyone who is supposed to be musical uses phrases relating to colour. Are they just affectations? Is there a blue haze to Debussy? Gounod, having completed his Faust opera, asked Melba to sing the jewel song in a bright jacaranda mauve. She seems to have done so, and the results, on the EMI record, are decidedly lilac. Orchestras do have colour and Saedi unleashed Monet like tones for this second Beethoven. But more than colour was unwrapped. Speed, tempo and glow brought the music to a splendid finish.

The second symphony can sound like this, perhaps, but should the third? It's historic and mythic political connections, the drama of power and death of heroes, all these elements have been more or less invented by time and by the hordes of awed listeners to the Eroica. This third symphony is one of the celebratory trophies of European music.

After the clear tones of No 2 we were deep into purple mourning with the Eroica. The first movement has an E flat brio like a song. By the second movement, though, we are in the funeral march and at the end of Beethoven's dream. He successfully buries hope and democracy, and like all exalted musicians stretches music to encompass eternity. Even colour is left behind on earth. We listen to the huge crescendoes and displays of strength and power -- a palpable part of Beethoven's makeup. And Saedi was confident of his deconstruction. He went the whole distance and ended with the third symphony staying on the bright -- the light -- side. We left strife -- the mammoth organ tones of Bach behind. We even left colour. Just plenty of light was enough.

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