6 - 12 December 2001
Issue No.563
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 December 2001 Issue No.563 |
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Sweet and bright
But nothing too sticky, writes David Blake
Grieg, Moscheles, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Cairo Symphony Orchestra, cond. Guihad Daoud, soloists Inas Abdel-Dayem (flute), Wessam Ahmed (oboe), Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 1 December
There were plenty of things to satisfy the sweet tooth in this concert. There were, too, plenty of bright things: it was sharp, bright of intention and seemed to race cheerfully to the end.
Did Peer Gynt really need Grieg? Or reverse the question: did Grieg really need Gynt? But worlds change, and the theatre paid more attention to the maunderings of Mrs Alving, Hedda Gabler or the crazy explosions of the master builder than to Grieg's gentle, reposeful music.
The music of Peer Gynt, written as a production unit to Ibsen's long work of the same name, in some ways resembles Tennyson's Maud. It is something with which to bore acquaintances. The play faded, though the music of Grieg hung on. It still does.
Like so much Grieg the music, quite innocently, without malice or intent, just goes on. Everyone likes it. No one criticises it. It has an alluring surface, which orchestras can manage without much fuss. The public takes it on the chin. It goes to regions quite outside such music's usual sphere. Grieg gets about. Even the piano concerto, once a pop knockabout piece, is still a regular part of the piano scene.
Inas Abdel-Dayem
As for his songs, the best of them can count, alongside Hugo Woolf and Schubert, as part of the international lieder scene. Far Monte Pincio is a mighty song, demanding great voice and interpretation.
But this concert's Grieg was the first part of the composer's music for Peer Gynt. The melodies, the gentler ones, are the sort of tunes that steal out from the orchestra to walk away with the whole show. They have the allure of fresh, green, newly mown grass, and seem, somehow, to never lose their sheen. Some of the sounds from this first, as well as the second Peer Gynt piece, have the smell of rain. It is refreshing, never stale, and well-treated by musicians probably bored to tears with it all.
The opening piece, Morning, is as famous as Over the Rainbow, though it comes from a higher-standard repertoire. Aase's Death is really quite astounding, plunging into the depths only to rise gently into a beautiful, heartfelt ending. Anitra's Dance came from somewhere in North Africa. It is a beautifully arranged tune, a little like those Tchaikovsky inserts in the Nutcracker to suggest the glamour of the Middle East.
Then comes the one kids love to send up at school concerts, In the Hall of the Mountain King. This bumps and thumps, getting uglier all the way, with Peer and the King galumphing through the halls of the palace. The end is the burst of sound that gives a strange, reverent, shy man like Grieg an opportunity to show he knows what is going on in other parts in the musical world. Not too green or clipped: the public may one day discover that dear Grieg has at his heart a grey patch, if not a black hole.
The second part of this concert -- Ignez Moscheles' Concerto for flute, oboe and orchestra, was a delicious shock. Moscheles was a professor, a rock on the landscape, one who should be observed and paid respects and then dismissed. He was celebrated for being unpleasant. Born in 1794, died in 1870, he represented the great age of professional exactitude and discipline.
Inas Abdel-Dayem (flute) and Wessam Ahmed (oboe) burst on the platform and gave this dry as dust professor from the Liepzig conservatory something to dance to.
It is a funny piece of music with an awesome opening, immediately taken up by the two players. A witty and amusing display of backchat with no holds barred. Flute and oboe don't usually get along quite so well as this couple did. They were in dancing mood, and were never still. It could have been mannered, but was not. The musicians responses were pure dance. These two wind players were playing in the same direction, towards the light, grace and high spirits. The ease and nonchalance was enough to take the breath away.
Jean Sibelius's tone poem, Finlandia, came next. Nothing could be further removed from the two bird-like people who had trilled their way through the 19th century, mocking the noise of folly. Here we were crushed by monoliths of black ice.
These were not climatic conditions to which one could readily adapt. Sometimes destruction is too total to be accommodated. It is not easy, after a shatteringly glamourous life, to be faced with a cubist hell determined on the destruction of everything.
The ice cubes of Sibelius are from a time to come: Finlandia heaves itself along to completion and as with so much Sibelius we are confounded by a vision so beautiful it permits any orchestra to do as it likes.
Finally, The Nutcracker Suite, broken up for listening. The orchestra did a great job amid the marvel of muddles of tonight's concert. Grieg to begin, then the birds of paradise of Moscheles, then Finlandia, to end with the Nutcracker, decentred, with no visual aspects. It was thanks to the orchestra that this piece became a matter of listening and not looking. The danger was always that it would fall flat. It did not.
Tchaikovsky's composition is viscerally visual -- each picture drawn perfectly. Listening to this etched piece of draughtsmanship is not the way to present it. If you have never seen the Nutcracker before, what would you think? The answer is in Tchaikovsky's music. It is a miracle of lightness, form and structure, replete in itself. Nothing can truly denude Tchaikovsky's orchestration. And so this concert finally produced the great white wave, a gesture of such arrogance, like a mad maharajah throwing away an archipelago.
Bright white flash and then the end. No dancers, and no nut prince.
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