Moments of nostalgia
It may be rose-tinted, but it convinced Amal Choucri Catta
Third Arabic Perspectives Festival; Cairo Symphony Orchestra, cond Mustafa Nagui, flautist Inas Abdel-Dayem. Main Hall Cairo Opera House, 7 February
Once again the stage was splendidly decorated for Saturday's second Main Hall concert of the Third Arabic Perspectives Festival presented by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, this time under Mustafa Nagui. Former president of the National Cultural Centre, Cairo Opera House, Mustafa Nagui -- cellist, composer and conductor -- is back for several concerts at the head of Cairo Symphony Orchestra. He is scheduled to conduct Khatchaturian's ballet Gayaneh and Mascagni's opera Cavalleria Rusticana this season. Last Saturday he conducted the third concert of this year's Arabic Perspectives Festival, his appearance at the podium greeted by a spontaneous outburst of applause.
Born in 1948, Nagui graduated from Cairo Conservatoire in 1971, completing his higher studies in the former Soviet Union. He has made many recordings as a cellist, and performed many recitals and concerts in Europe and the US while being resident conductor of the Conservatoire Orchestra. He has conducted the Cairo Symphony Orchestra regularly since 1982. Nagui was also head of the Musical Sector of the National Cultural Centre before being appointed chairman of same.
Last Saturday the concert started with Bishara Al- Khouri's orchestral poem Opus 2, Le regard du Christ, an abstractedly pious rendering of Christ's message on earth, an orchestral vision of redemption through love. This was a demanding piece of music, an interesting research in singular harmony and unusual polyphony deploying a markedly bravura percussion.
Bishara Al-Khouri, born in Beirut in 1957, spreads his net wide: he is a composer, poet, pianist and conductor. He began his musical education in Lebanon before arriving in Paris in 1979, where he pursued his studies in composition and orchestration at the École Normale de Musique. Between 1969 and 1978 Al-Khouri produced over 100 works, compositions that met with wide acclaim and which have been performed by the Orchestre National de France and the Moscow Philharmonic, among others. Patrick Bishay's Passacaglia for Orchestra followed, a difficult piece of music with astounding percussion and syncopating effects the orchestra -- mainly the strings and brass -- had some difficulty following. The Passacaglia is an old dance-form of three-in-a-measure rhythm generally erected on a ground- bass, a brief thematic motif in bass repeated with constantly changing harmonies while upper parts proceed and vary. But Bishay's treatment of the form concentrated on vehement percussion, leaving the motif and its changing harmonies somewhat stranded. Bishay is an Egyptian-German, born in 1975 in Braunschweig. He studied composition at Berkeley College of Music, in Boston, and in 1999 won Berkeley's Barnes and Noble Composition Award. In September 1999 he left the US for Newcastle, UK, to study for a PhD degree in composition. In February 2001 Bishay was the runner up in the Northern Symphony's Young Composer competition. He has produced a concerto for contrabass and harp, an opera, Machine Justice, a ballet, The Second Life of Pharaoh and a concerto for piano and orchestra. Bishay's concentration on technical innovation sacrifices melody to sound: indeed, tonight's audience only finally got melody with Gamal Salama's My Love, a brief but enchanting piece for flute and orchestra with Inas Abdel- Dayem as soloist. That the piece had to be repeated as an encore for an audience that applauded endlessly seems to suggest that it is melody the audience was after. My Love, an unpretentious orchestral love song, gave the flute little time to breathe as it rushed through a melodious moto perpetuo to a radiant finale.
Born in Alexandria in 1945, Gamal Salama joined the Cairo Conservatoire in 1962, obtaining a scholarship to Moscow where he studied composition with Aram Khatchaturian. In 1976 he received a doctorate degree in composition from Moscow's Tchaikovsky Conservatoire. Salama is staff member of Cairo Conservatoire and is currently artistic consultant at Cairo Opera House.
Inas Abdel-Dayem is a justly popular performer with an impressive CV: having graduated from Cairo Conservatoire she obtained a scholarship to study in France at the École Normale de Musique where she received her PhD. She has represented Egypt in many international festivals, is a professor at the Academy of Arts and first flautist with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra. In 1999 she founded a class to teach flute at the Cairo Opera House and is, presently, administrative director of the Cairo Symphony Orchestra.
The second part of the concert opened with an interesting composition by Amr Okba, Tableau Nubien, a radiant symphonic rendering of Nubian folkloric recollections. Both harmony and polyphony were interestingly idiosyncratic. Having studied business administration and economy at Cairo University Okba joined Cairo Conservatoire in 1994, studying composition with Rageh Dawoud. He obtained his diploma with distinction in 1998, and a year later was awarded the Supreme Council for Culture's composition prize. He subsequently spent a year at the Egyptian Academy in Rome, studying at the Conservatoire of Santa Cecilia, and is currently on a scholarship to Austria.
Syrian Dia' Al-Succari's fabulous Forgotten Splendours came on next, resurrected from last year's Arabic Perspectives Festival. A composer, conductor and professor of musical notation at the Higher Music Institute in Paris, Al-Succari has written several books on music, mainly on the teaching of musical notations and signs. His works, ranging from chamber music to symphony, are inspired by oriental themes. Among them are the Suite for Piano and Violin, the Sand Magician for oboe and piano, the Orange Tree for harp and Chant d'Urnina, Lailat Al-Qadr, as well as several works for children's choir. His music presents colourful images of a nostalgically viewed past: gallant, brave,
spectacular, glorious, and all in the most vivid of polyphonic palettes. It is a stimulating composition with, perhaps inevitably, an undertow of regret.
The concert ended on an even more nostalgic note with Youssef Greiss' genial symphonic poem Misr, a tender pastoral for the Nile Valley and the peace of the countryside. The violins sighed their recurring melody, a whisper among the palm trees. Growing stronger, the music ran a joyful course through the green valley. There was a poignant longing in the musical description of Hapi, the ancient river god, as the music charted the lazy meanderings of a river yet to be contained between embankments followed by a vivid illustration of endless spaces, lonely deserts and desolate skies. Finally, the musical poem paid tribute to fallen soldiers and to all those who had died in defence of the fatherland. The finale came as a sombre, gloomy funeral march, a mirthless melody that brought the poem to a solemn end.
Youssef Greiss was born in Cairo in 1899: his first contact with music began as a child, with violin lessons in both oriental and occidental styles. He went on to study under Joseph Huttel, the then conductor of Cairo Radio Symphony Orchestra, who premiered Misr in Alexandria in 1932. The same Misr brought Saturday's rather demanding concert to a dignified close.
