Preludes and poems
Amal Choucri Catta strolls between executions and exhibitions
Geneva Chamber Orchestra with the Cairo Opera Orchestra, cond. Nader Abbassi. Honegger, Puccini, Abbassi and Mussorgsky, performed under the auspices of the United Nations, Geneva. Main Hall, Cairo Opera House, 19 February, 8pm
This official event, organised under the auspices of the United Nations in Geneva and with introductory speeches by Raimund Kunz, ambassador of Switzerland in Egypt, and Dominique Follmi, president of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra, featured one of the best musical ensembles in Switzerland.
The Geneva Chamber Orchestra joined Cairo Opera Orchestra for a concert the avowed aim of which was to further peace and understanding. It was conducted by Nader Abbassi, sometime resident of Switzerland and previously first bassoonist of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra. He has also performed with the celebrated Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and made concert tours in several European countries.
The two orchestras looked impressively at home on the main stage of Cairo's Opera House. The performance was likewise impressive, beginning with Honegger's Pacific 2311, a musical depiction of the "tranquil respiration of a machine at rest and in motion".
The strings, cellos and double basses play an important part in the opening movement included in the programme, which begins almost in slow motion and then picks up speed, accelerating constantly until reaching top velocity, then gradually slowing down until coming to a final stop. It was a magnificent account of a train leaving one station and then entering the next, and of the journey between, with the intervening landscape gradually subsumed by the powerful din of the engine. Marvelously performed and conducted, this demanding piece of music deserved the cheers it received from the audience. Nader Abbassi's positive, brisk and vigorous direction constitutes real achievement.
After this hard, austere and overwhelming movement, the mood changed and we were presented with a deliriously romantic symphonic prelude by Puccini. The choice was clearly intended to give the listener an idea of the orchestra's, and the maestro's, skills and capabilities. Deliciously coloured, the prelude was a pleasant interlude between the powerful Pacific and the tragic item on tonight's programme, a symphonic poem by Nader Abbassi, Between Dusk and Dawn, based on the lives of Rayya and Sekina, two sisters destined to become Egypt's most notorious serial killers.
According to the composer the musical action takes place, as the title insists, "between dusk and dawn" on the day the two sisters are to be executed. Rayya meditates on her life, her destiny, on her crimes and the sufferings that will result in her death. The percussive sections of the poem are central, and much use is made of traditional Arabic instruments, the darabuka, sagats and dof. The three sections of this at- times-macabre piece of music contain passages that dazzle with their variety of texture and colour. Luxuriant, exotic, listeners are apt to find themselves in the strangest, the most unexpected of musical experiences.
The poem begins with a "mysterious and obscure introduction". Solo instruments herald the drama that is to unfold in the grave keys until two melodies on the woods introduce the two sisters. And it is a charming introduction, though there is an undertow of fear.
The mood changed with the opening of the second part, a movement expressing life in the bazaar through an animated dialogue between strings and woods. But the rhythm is brief, and the music then concentrates on a short, sad tune, announcing the arrival of the sisters' innocent prey. The whole orchestra joins in, and the audience knows that Rayya and Sekina have found their next victim.
A frenzied Zar preceeds the death of the girl. Then the lights grow dim as the music subsides into an eloquent pianissimo. The cycle ends with a calm sequence, tranquil yet devoid of joy.
Rayya muses on her way to the gallows and the music ends softly, intimating at least a prayer for forgiveness. It was met with endless bravos, a triumph for both poem and maestro.
The atmosphere of the second half of the concert could not have been more different. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, originally a suite for piano solo, was written in 1874, inspired by drawings and paintings at a memorial exhibition for the Russian artist Victor Hartmann, who had died a year earlier and who was a friend of Mussorgsky. The Suite was subsequently orchestrated by several composers, with Maurice Ravel's 1922 version remaining the most popular.
It was the Ravel version that we heard, an orchestration of the entire exhibition as reimagined by Mussorgsky, including the Promenades, those "linking passages in modo Russico" which join one picture to the other while the viewer, in this case the composer, ambles gently between one work of art and the next, describing each picture.
We begin with "Gnomus", a disfigured gnome on twisted legs which, in reality, was a sculptured head of Nutcracker, depicted by musical dissonances and syncopated rhythms eloquently expressed by the orchestra. Next came "The Old Castle" with a troubadour singing: here two melancholic themes alternate, one solemnly grim, the other lyrical, and both nostalgic, reminiscent of bygone ages when songs were few and singers rare. The Old Castle opened the doors to "Les Tuileries", the entire piece called forth by a picture representing Hartmann's hurriedly sketched corner of the garden, with children playing, to which the composer invented "a dispute among children after a game" with animated rhythms and a brisk, rather joyful tempo.
It was clear from the start the Maestro had no intention of lingering overly long on one or other of the paintings. Colours were always bright, even in the crescendo announcing the heavy, regular advance of "Bydlo", a Polish chariot pulled by oxen. With the tread of Bydlo, the "Promenades" came to a charming end and we moved in to the wit and humour of the "Ballet of Unhatched Chickens", followed by the rather less humorous "Samuel Goldenberg and Schuyle", the rich and poor, their heads sketched as "types" by Hartmann.
"Market place at Limoges" came next, with its quarrelling women, again based on a drawing. Mussorgsky's imagined quarrel met with a more than adequate response from the instrumentalists. "Les Catacombes" and the Promenade "Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua" were followed by one of the more dramatic pieces, "La cabane sur des pattes de poule", inspired by a clock Hartmann designed, an evocation of Baba-Yaga, the terrifying witch of Russian legend.
"The great gate of Kiev" crowns the entire work, an epic fresco, with bells ringing, religious chants echoing, all the paraphernalia of a glamorous show coming vigorously to a triumphant end. A passionate, invigorating musical suite performed brilliantly by the two orchestras, from whom Nader Abbassi coaxed the necessary contrasts and subtle inflexions.
