12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Linger longer, why don't you?
David Blake hears piano pianissimo, the genuine thing and rare
Musiques vivantes en Mediterranée, Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 7 July
From its first notes this concert suffused the house in a joyful ecstasy of softness. Gently pervasive, like the waters which rush over magic Mediterranean islands, the very transparency of blue proved more than a match for any pollutants of either the word or the sound. And tonight's concert added yet another dimension -- the peculiarities of an extreme pianissimo echo that became the voice of the muse. This sort of music began with the Argonauts and ended with Strauss's Ariadne.
The evening's first piece was Edward Elgar's Serenade for Strings, op 20. It was a hazardous choice that brought with it unique benefits. The director knew his instrument and its capabilities. This orchestra is a forceful, young, cosmopolitan lot and they care delicately for every detail. If you expected them to rush and jump at all the hurdles set for them by Elgar you were destined to be disappointed; for orchestra and conductor had taken another way. They forgot -- perhaps they had never even heard of -- the Elgar of legend. Lively -- the orchestra presented the Serenade as was, so a serenade we had. It possessed lightness, sadness and regret, and something other, probably called romance by the composer. Orchestra and maestro adopted an unconventional approach and gave the audience a noble, high- toned romantic outpouring far removed from the usual slap and sparkle attempts orchestras make to wake up that old bird, Elgar. It is a long time now since poor old Edward was dumped into a Sussex garden to become the Kitchener of English music. What this concert revealed was that he really did have a heart, a heart as wind-blown and vulnerable as a white daisy. "Not for you to reason why, yours is but to do and die." Such sentiments hardly suit him though they have been hanging around his reputation forever.
Whatever the popularity of his big pieces no one ever really loved Elgar. They put up with him. But time, usually so deadly, often does a compassionate salvage job with the reputation of musicians and so it has with Elgar. With endlessly endearing variegated use of pianissimo as a musical state of being in itself, never heard before like this, the Elgar piece was full of love and beauty and the atmosphere of the Opera House itself seemed to take on a state of beatification. Elgar had become, due to accidental fame and glory, something of a monster-fairy in the English garden. This orchestra transformed him into an angel of the Annunciation.
So to the piece by Mohamed Sidiq, the first movement of a concerto for nay and orchestra. The nay is everything to everyone -- primitive, the voice of the countryside, romantic, wailing of love and war and the history of Arab nations. Its scope is amazing, its power of domination over an orchestra astounding.
Sidiq never went for the unconventional approach but provided an Arab sound, the nay, in stately dance with Western forms. The effect was tender and full of compassion, a choreography of mutual embrace.
This Iraqi composer has a strange and finely worked out orchestral tone. The nay sang its way into the major key like a clarinet and then went out, far away into a landscape seldom seen or heard. The tone was plangent, romantic, and far beyond the flute.
On the heels of the romance of the nay, fairly knocking it over, came La Notte, Vivaldi's concerto for violin in six movements. They are all short, almost telegraphic pieces. This is not just Vivaldi in a hurry, but Vivaldi in a hurry on his mobile.
La Notte was played with a vivacity of an electric storm. Vivaldi, creature of a time called historic, had a life that surged along even by today's standards. It seems impossible that he could have accomplished so much in so little time -- he was everywhere, exhausting everyone. When all the fountains of Versailles are turned on at once, that is Vivaldi. But he is more than virtuosity, which in itself would be boring. He offers as well a kind of spiritual liberation from all forms of composure. Nervous, anguished by dark, lit by dazzle and sparkle, he gives us the water of life.
In La Notte he suddenly stops dead in the middle, as if looking for a quick get away. Chord. Then another stop. Then off streaks Vivaldi again.
The soloist was more than up to the composer's stops and starts, fairly zooming through the piece. Section five, one of the edifices of music: the hundred eyes of Argos are suddenly sleeping as we descend into a nightmare devoid of all personality. It comes to an end, yes -- beautiful and exciting, but the final crash to victory is strangely Pyhrric because it brings only the certainty of end.
After La Notte anything would sound slow. The final piece, Love Poem, by Solhi Al-Wadi, returned to pianissimo, though on a slower pedal. Al-Wadi is from Iraq too. The work, played immaculately by the orchestra, is noble, stately and long. It has some deep patches. Where, we wonder, could this love be?
The music nods to Brahms, which is fine, and then moves on, more elegant than stately, towards an end that contains more than a hint of uncertainty. It pays to be generous to love.
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