Issue No. 613
Culture
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21 - 27 November 2002 Issue No. 613 Culture |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | |||
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Innovations unfortunate
Amal Choucri Catta laments the gaps between notes
Highlights from The Sound of Music and West Side Story; Cairo Opera and the Cairo Opera Orchestra; cond. Nayer Nagui and Jean- François Alexandre. Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, Thursday, 14 November 9.30pm
One hardly expected an evening of surprises. The Cairo Opera House promised highlights from Rodgers and Hammerstein's Sound of Music and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, featuring the Cairo Opera Company's soloists and the Cairo Opera Orchestra directed by the Egyptian Nayer Nagui and by the French Jean-François Alexandrie. Nothing new about that then.
But we were wrong: on arrival there was no trace of the Cairo Opera Orchestra. It had been replaced by vibraphones, xylophones, marimbas, bells, Glockenspiel, drums and cymbals, with the percussionists supplemented by a piano and an organ, the latter being used for the nuns' hymns.
The two musicals had been arranged by Jean-François Alexandre, with Greig Martin on the keyboards and Nesma Abdel-Aziz, Mohamed Saad Basha, Hesham Kamal and Genadi Sarapulov on the different percussions. So we were to be treated to the musical with a difference, the musical with a hint of the avant-grade. Jehane Morsi had done an impressive job on the main stage, with soft lights, dark drapes and scenes from the musicals projected onto a giant screen at the far end, behind the instruments. The elaborate mise-en-scène was similar to that Morsi had created for a Demis Roussos Concert a few years ago. This time, however, the singers were in costume. The four nuns appeared on stage in white attire: mezzo-soprano Jolie Faizy as the Mother Abbess, soprano Sarah Enany as Margaretha, mezzo-soprano Hala El-Shaboury as Bertha and soprano Isabella Fayed as Sophia. They opened the concert with "Dixit Dominus", followed by the "Morning Hymn" and "Halleluya", under an extremely subtle baton of Maestro Nayer Nagui. Then came Maria with the title song: this time it was Nevine Allouba's turn to tell us that the trees were "alive with the sound of music" while Jacqueline Rafik, who usually sang the part of Maria, turned into Liesel, Captain von Trapp's eldest daughter. The story unfolded on stage through the 14 songs of the film: Liesel sang "Sixteen going on seventeen" with Tamer Tewfik, somewhat indisposed on the night in the role of Rolf.
Of late Nevine Allouba has been seen and heard mostly in musicals, concerts or recitals, either in Cairo or in Alexandria. It has been too long since she has appeared on the main stage in an operatic role, which begs the question why we have an opera house and opera singers in the first place given that they are not to be offered opportunities to perform. The oft heard argument that opera is a foreign import and as such alienates local audiences is simply hot air. Football is a foreign import, and manages to dominate TV programming schedules and the imaginations of a fair chunk of the population.
Ballet and opera, classical music, indeed culture in general, appears to be in decline. Local viewers are offered only a 30-minute ballet programme on Channel II, once a week, sometime around 2am, when most people are asleep, while another 30-minute weekly programme is granted to classical music. There is no provision whatsoever for opera while the weekly symphonic concerts which two years ago were televised live every Saturday from the Opera's main hall, seldom find their way on to screen these days. When they do only the first part -- the overture and the concerto -- is televised: the viewers never get to hear the second part, the symphony.
Last Thursday's concert started out well enough, with the nuns and Nevine Allouba in her simili-Dirndl, the Austrian rural attire for women. But it went wrong as soon as the children appeared on stage. There were nine girls. Women were in the majority on this night. Indeed, the musical counted only two men, baritone Raouf Zaidan, who gave us, as Captain von Trapp, a beautiful version of "Edelweiss", and tenor Tamer Tewfik. The absence of boys among the children was somewhat disconcerting: they sang "So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye", in a matter-of-fact, unconvincing way. Together their voices were too loud, and solo, too thin. Nevine Allouba succeeded, however, in saving the situation, with "Do - Re - Mi". The young girls were not ready yet for a feat of this kind: they needed far more rehearsals. Whatever subtlety there might have been vanished into thin air. There was a change in mood, as well as in tempo, beat and volume. "Climb every mountain", the Abbess's passionate song, was too loud; though she was using a microphone that night, as all other singers did, Jolie Faizy was incapable of mastering the volume. Her song was repeated in the finale by the whole group, bringing the musical to an end.
Jean-François Alexandre, the French conductor who came on stage for the second part of that evening's programme, seemed to have a wrong idea about West Side Story: the tale indicates the bitter tensions between the Jets, an American street gang, and the Sharks, a group of young Puerto-Ricans. This is a story of love and hate, of fighting and killing and death. Unlike The Sound of Music, West Side Story is violent, impetuous, vehement and cruel. The gangs assemble in Doc's drugstore to choose the weapons and the place for the planned fight. The story is filled with action, with drama, until the final tragedy, when Tony of the Jets is killed by Chino of the Sharks. It is a take on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet: the rhythm is animated, the action brisk -- with the exception of the love-scenes and the love-songs featuring Tony, the American and Maria, the Puerto-Rican. The idea of re- arranging the musical score for percussion and piano did nobody any favours. The sound became sparse, the melody thinly scattered, with an overdose of syncopation and a steady diet of long silences between one note and the next. With the orchestra gone, the rich melodies had disappeared, leaving a hollow percussive sound with the tunes restricted solely to the singers. And most of the latter were not prepared for the performance. They marched on stage with their scores, and some of them had difficulty reading their lyrics. The real star of this show was baritone Elhamy Amin, who sang the part of Riff, leader of the Jets: his "Jet Song" was strong and particularly expressive, while "Cool" was melodious and demure. It was excellent. Nevine Allouba, in the role of Anita, gave us a lovely version of "America", while Hala El-Shaboury, as Rosalia, insisted on "going back to San Juan". "Somewhere", too, was brilliantly presented by Nevine Allouba, who was joined by Jacqueline Rafik in "A boy like that". Jacqueline was particularly touching in the role of Maria. Yet neither she, nor Elhamy Amin, nor Nevine Allouba could save the musical situation that night.
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