No puzzles here
Amal Choucri Catta listens to an event
Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra, cond Long Yu; Ahmed Abu Zahra, piano. Main Hall, Cairo Opera House, 5 December, 8pm
1954 was a good year for Dimitri Shostakovich. When he began a new composition -- a brief work of around four minutes -- he was in clearly festive mood. The Festival Overture was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on 6 November to mark the anniversary of the Soviet Revolution and the 150th anniversary of Mikhail Glinka, "the great genius of Russian music" according to Shostakovich, who had, furthermore, been granted the title People's Artist of the USSR for his services to the arts that year. In recognition of his services to the cause of strengthening peace and friendship among nations, the World Peace Council had also awarded Shostakovich the World Peace Prize on 4 September. The 12 months would finally be capped when, on 11 December, he was elected Honourary Member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Music.
Shostakovich's Festival Overture, Opus 96, opened the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra's stupendous concert last Friday, under the formidable baton of Long Yu. It was a memorable event, noteworthy not only for the colourful interpretation of the musicians but for the magnificent execution of the entire ensemble, replete with impeccable timing and an enormous and sadly rare sense of style.
Long Yu was conducting an orchestra whose enthusiasm was infectious. Their sensitivity and energy could not have been more exuberant, and it was an exuberance communicated to the audience who took as much pleasure watching them as hearing them play. This fine-tuned, technically staggering Festival Overture met with rapturous applause.
Founded in 1957, the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra was among the first musical ensembles to be created following the Chinese Revolution. Long Yu, its current musical director, is also director of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and the Beijing Musical Festival. Besides its regular symphonic concerts Guangzhou Symphony works regularly alongside leading ballet companies -- the Bolshoi, Paris Opera Ballet, German National Ballet, Hungarian State Opera Ballet and Australian Ballet Company among them -- having built up an impressive repertoire of dance music. The orchestra has also performed operas -- Carmen, La Bohème and Werther -- and tours extensively.
Long Yu himself was granted the 2002 Mont Blanc Arts Patronage Award from the Mont Blanc Cultural Foundation and was elected Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 2003. He is undoubtedly one of the more dazzling conductors to have graced the Cairo Opera Main Stage, treating audiences to a display of passionate emotion and firm authority. Dimitri Shostakovich, often considered the greatest 20th century composer, would almost certainly have appreciated Long Yu's alluring overture.
When young Egyptian virtuoso Ahmed Abu Zahra came on stage he surprised everyone by arriving microphone in hand. Carefully avoiding unasked questions he calmly told the audience he would like to say a few words about the piano concerto he was scheduled to perform.
French composer Camille Saint-Saens was an extraordinary pianist and organist, who travelled widely, preferably to warmer countries given a family history of tuberculosis. It worked, given that he eventually died of a heart attack aged 80.
Saint-Saens visited Egypt more than once, and wrote his fifth piano concerto -- often called the Egyptian Concerto -- on the banks of the Nile.
Composed in 1895, Concerto No 5 in F-major, Opus 103, was premiered the following year in Paris, at a concert celebrating the 50th anniversary of Saint-Saens' first concert appearance as a pianist. Ahmed Abu Zahra's comments were greeted with appreciation by the audience, an appreciation that continued when he started to play.
The concerto's first allegro animato, reminiscent of a remarkably poetic sonata, leads the way to the andante, full of exotic melodies. The theme, said to be that of a boatman sailing on the Nile, seems to have captured Saint-Saens' imagination as he tried to reproduce the Arab "quarter tone" on the piano. It was a challenge in which he only partly succeeded. The third movement, molto allegro, is witty and animated. The orchestra was magnificent, though the pianist remained in charge of the concerto, in the andante, particularly, producing a masterpiece of technical adventurism.
Ahmed Abu Zahra is no newcomer to Cairene audiences: he has often performed as a soloist, and with his wife, Hungarian pianist Nora Emody, on the opera's Main Stage. He is one of Egypt's more accomplished pianists, though he took up the instrument relatively late, at the age of 18, at the Cairo Conservatoire. In later years he was taught by James Avery at the Freiburg School of Music, as well as Ferenc Rados and Andreas Schiff, with whom he worked both privately and in a number of master classes. In 1996 Abu Zahra received a DAAD scholarship at the Heidelberg- Mannheim Music School and attended master classes with Gyorgy Sandor and Gyorgy Kurtag, among others. Since 1993 he has played with many European, Asian and American orchestras, including the Vienna Symphony, the Baden-Baden Philharmonic, the Florida and the Heidelberg Philharmonic and the New World Symphony.
At Cairo's Main Hall, Friday night, Abu Zahra gave an impressive account of Saint-Saens' Egyptian Concerto: the drama, grandeur of conception, and beauty of expression combined to turn the concerto into a truly memorable event. The audience was ecstatic: recalled on stage several times, Abu Zahra gave us a pleasant, Egyptian, encore.
In the end came Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in E-minor, Opus 64, in four movements. Few composers are more popular with audiences than Tchaikovsky: his music is tuneful, luxuriously scored and filled with emotional fervour. He had a tendency to extreme fluctuations, between elation and depression, each success being followed by a period of introspective gloom and melancholy. Likewise his fifth symphony, which opens with a sombre, solemn, rather mournful andante, preceding an allegro con anima which has the violins joyfully singing while musical sunshine seems to illuminate the entire score. But clouds are gathering again by the second andante cantabile, with the ever recurring theme turning into a waltz in the third movement. The allegro moderato that follows leads into the finale with the mournful theme brilliantly taken up by the chanting violins, culminating in a triumphant tutti fortissimi.
That hall erupted into spontaneous bravos. Maestro Long Yu was called back to the stage numerous times and finally gave a beautiful Chinese tune as encore.
The audience had attended a happening, and were more than happy to have been present.
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : 11 - 17 December 2003 (Issue No. 668)
Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/668/cu2.htm