Amal Choucri Catta turns Magyar Gala Concert: Cairo Opera Orchestra, cond. Nader Abbassi, piano soloist Cyprien Katsaris. Venue: Main Hall, Cairo Opera House, 8 January, 8pm Nader Abbassi's Opera Orchestra is always full of surprises. After Bach, Carmen and the Gala waltzes of last December they were back, last week, at Cairo Opera's main hall with a musical evening dedicated to Hungarian music. The celebrated French-Cypriot pianist Cyprien Katsaris turned the concert into an event with Franz Liszt's second piano concerto, gracefully granting the audience three encores. The performance started, however, with one of Liszt's loveliest works: Les preludes, the third of 12 symphonic poems composed in 1848 and revised prior to 1854. The title is taken from one of Alphonse de Lamartine's Nouvelles meditations poetiques, though the music was originally created as overture to Les quatre elements. Prefacing the revised score, Liszt wrote: "What is life but a series of preludes to that unknown song unlocking the door to death". Alternating and opposing contemplative and vivacious episodes, Liszt succeeded in balancing form and content, taking the main theme from the somewhat sombre initial slow introduction and leading it gradually to final orchestral glory. The theses are graceful or vigorous, majestic, colourful and passionate, simultaneously evocative of the beauty of life and of human sorrow and suffering. The end is heroic: last week the violins were magnificent, the brass brilliant -- indeed, the entire orchestra was remarkable. Liszt returned with Katsaris, pianist and composer, who spent his childhood in Cameroon before graduating from the Paris Conservatoire and winning a number of international prizes. He has performed with many leading orchestras and been honoured and decorated in as many countries. He is undoubtedly a great master of the keyboard and any virtuoso performance of Liszt is an unforgettable event. Born in Hungary in 1811, Liszt died in Bayreuth in 1886. He gave his first recital aged nine, went to Vienna aged 20 and was a pupil of both Sallieri and Czerny. At the age of 23, he played in Paris and a year later in London, where he was received by George IV. His fame as a virtuoso pianist, flamboyant in style and taste, was at its height. He lived with Countess Marie d'Agoult: of their three children, Cosima became the wife of Hans Freiherr von Buelow, and then of Richard Wagner. There is an interesting link between the former and Cairo: Buelow was performing at the Cairo Opera House in the 1890s and died in Cairo in 1894. He was among the greatest of the foreign musicians to play a role in the musical life of Cairo's old Opera House. Up to 1847 Liszt toured widely, including Russia. Then in 1848 he was appointed Kappellmeister at the Weimar Court, where he remained for 11 successful years. In 1865 he took minor orders, and from 1869 divided his time between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, his amorous adventures remaining, as always, the talk of Europe. Liszt remains a romantic enigma of music, a genius with a touch of the charlatan, a virtuoso with the flair of an actor-manager, a man generous to colleagues and the young. Cyprien Katsaris' performance was the highlight of the programme and the audience would not let him go: his first encore was one of Frederic Chopin's Nocturnes, played with breath-taking sensitivity. It was followed by a vivacious Mexican Adios and finally by Das Butterbrot, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose 200th birthday is celebrated this year. This was a brief, pleasant, amusing piece of music, evoking the motion of buttering bread. Everybody loved it. This time though, Katsaris left, hopefully to return again to the Main Hall some time in the not too distant future. The second part of the concert opened with Seven Romanian Folk Dances by Bela Bartok, a man whose fascination with folksong and desire to turn from Romantic excess led him to develop a highly original style, infused with traditional Eastern European rhythms and unusual instrumental effects. He once declared that "the right type of peasant music is most varied and perfection its forms. Its expressive power is astonishing and at the same time it is devoid of all sentimentality and superfluous ornaments... A composer in search of new ways cannot be led by a better master." For Bartok the "right type of music" was not the sophisticated urban style of the gypsies but the less refined traditional melodies that had been passed through generations in rural communities. His researches led him to Transylvania, Romania, Bulgaria, to the Atlas Mountains, North Africa and Turkey, and he collected around 20,000 melodies. Born in 1881, Bartok was not only an outstanding composer and virtuoso pianist but one of the world's most influential ethnomusicologists. One of his most popular works, the one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle, was performed in Cairo a few years ago. The "Romanian Folk Dances", perfectly interpreted by the orchestra, were quite interesting. Bartok died in New York in 1945. The concert closed with eight of Johannes Brahms's 21 Hungarian Dances. The young Brahms had developed a passion for the many collections of folk material compiled in the wake of Romanticism and would eventually make over 200 folksong arrangements. He read deeply in folk tales and mythology, and toured with the Hungarian fiddler Ede Remenyi. Whatever he then picked up of Hungarian-gypsy music continued to resurface for the rest of his life. Born in Germany in 1833, Brahms died in Austria in 1897 and is today considered both a champion of the past and a pioneer of the future. The Hungarian Dances were performed with brilliance. The Maestro's conducting was sensational and the entire concert a real triumph.
