7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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The lion stalks again
David Blake compares ghosts
Piano recital; Yasser Mokhtar; Small Hall: Cairo Opera House, 29 May
The name is Yasser Mokhtar, though at times he appears to be joined to another person behind the music, to Godowsky, Leopold. Leo the Lion he was called.
The effect of the young lion, Mokhtar, on music and audience is much like that of the old one. Mokhtar is a mover and goer. He comes here, seldom but when he does the Small Hall is shattered. A lot of rockery as well as music gets broken. But Mokhtar is a polite feline, unlike some pianists who are "wild." He prefers order and a carefully composed reticence to chopping and flaying. He has a sense of intimacy in spite of the excitement he projects. The question might be asked of him, as it was once asked of another lion, Percy Grainger: "Do you use your feet too?" When hands never look numerous enough what's left but the feet?
Mokhtar opened the recital with the piano sonata of Mona Ghoneim. Like most of her music it is a thing of contrasts -- flat, calm, long-noted surfaces, then waves, darkly huge and rough, suddenly dipping into calm bays of shelter and peace. The entire work is open to many different approaches. Mokhtar had an answer to all of them. Craggy cliffs, the roaring storm and sudden calm always found him ready for change. Ghoneim provides an almost Lisztian work-out for the player.
To start with, Mokhtar does not do it big. He does not pull out any of the strings of the professional virtuoso. Once, years ago, Mokhtar was a deep, probing teenage player. Now he uses a lighter touch and is a full grown enigma in his own right.
So the Ghoneim was down-played and under-produced, the stormy undercurrent always ready to slip into a song-like, hurried respite before the waves start breaking once again.
From whichever direction Ghoneim is approached she is, musically, a big person. There is always feeling, colour and a sense of nervous distraction, which gives her a great advantage. Many composers try for what she achieves, and achieves with force and brevity. It says much for her that after hearing this sonata on three occasions one needs a fourth.
Yasser Mokhtar
All the stops and turns were made clear as piano writing. It is a splendid piece and will overcome its admittedly brave attempts at grasping both ends of the musical stick. Virtuoso or earnest prober, there is room in this piece for both.
The next piece, Beethoven's Sonata No 2 in D Minor Op 31, began darkly and full of forebodings. While Beethoven has a scenario and sticks to it, Ghoneim, allowed greater 20th century leeway, is soon exploring through all points of the compass. She is paradoxical while Beethoven comes out of his sonata free. She at the end is still ploughing about in her rough seas.
What does music for the piano mean to players of such power and sense of discovery as Mokhtar? What is he doing it for, this music, in this manner and for whom? It tells no tales as it passes through Mokhtar's mighty grasp of its technical problems. He moves so quick, so powerful and decided that the passing landscape merges and melts into a haze, like an endless well-pruned hedge. He is a lighting expert and the handling of all the components of his playing is his own work. He is as direct as a pavement artist and his piece of pavement is his piano. He and his piano become parts of the pavement.
This disbursed Beethoven, however, could not avoid formal shaping; it is part of Beethoven's reality that his shape is immediately recognisable. Mokhtar had his way, though, and he erased all shapes and personal observations. Beethoven really did sound new, opaque and not so all-too-easily recognisable.
It would be exciting to let Mokhtar loose on Ellington's piece Solitude. Not easy music, but then Mokhtar is not an easy player. His Beethoven showed the way it would go in the future: something new, blue, never heard before. Both the Duke and Mokhtar have their grandeur, so it could be a long, long listen.
After the Beethoven unveiling there was Prokofiev's Sarcasms Op 17. This music does not often sound the way Mokhtar played. In the middle Prokofiev hid one of his beautiful sad song tunes, good enough for Romeo and Juliet. But search and you would find not a trace of sentiment or colour. Prokofiev was thrown in the bleacher, then out and into the drier, then out and into the heat presser. The result was hung on a sort of endless Los Angeles clothes line to mock both suburbanism and vacuousness. It was performed with a Mozartian precision with chill-iced-ornaments and a broken-hearted central whirlpool.
Last came Chopin. This city has heard Mokhtar play Chopin on other occasions. These six pieces were more for the treasure chest: old tales ripped to pieces in waltz, polka, troika, mazurka and fox-trot -- a lively lot of last waltzes in Warsaw.
And then something happened. Everyone loves Mokhtar for his daring, his mockery and his sheer physical thrill. At the centre of the Chopin tray of goodies lay the Berceuse for Piano Solo. As a pianist Mokhtar redresses most of the music he plays, not just interpretation or conceit but a way of seeing and hearing things so originally, so seriously, so involved with the message from the notes that one must attend to his requirements. He has the upper hand. What would he do with the hallowed Berceuse, a Lisztian dream, erotic, troubled and Freudian?
Where was the mother, where the baby? Then it happened again. The other lion, the hunter from the great plains of music, Leopold Godowsky, seemed to be around. Mokhtar played as someone we might hear a few times a year. There was no baby, no mother, merely the gentle rocking rhythm of a person in deep meditation, a reverie of peace and plenty and -- strangest of all -- of space. The Berceuse flowed out from the piano; no breakages in this mood.
Once again Mokhtar had the upper hand: he played like some of the old ones and a wise old teller of tales was with us.
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