David Blake, Al-Ahram Weekly 's long-serving music critic whose death in 2002 deprived readers of his regular weekly take on Cairo's music scene, served always with aplomb, was born on 16 June, 1916. To mark the 90th anniversary of his birth we reprint below the article in which he introduced readers to the unforgettable diva Olga Moon, that Angel of the Annunciation on whose presence depends the success of any opera house worth the name Reality to be reassuring has to be what we see. And on the other hand, not so comforting is fantasy, dream or death. This recital was the other hand. Olga Moon was advertised simply as voice, no category, no programme -- period. She came on to the stage of the Small Hall to face us, more fellah than fille, not so tall, but having impressive presence. A kind of 'Mister-being', but not masculine, having the challenging manner cultivated by royalty. We looked at her, and she screamed her way through the opening five songs by Luciano Berio, written for Moon after she had made her third attempt at an operatic come-back in the sixties. The last song in particular was a tour-de-force -- an account of a lady trilling her way through an operatic aria while reporting on the mutual carnage of her marriage. After this song she strode off the scene, leaving the pianist, Harper James, to mop up the applause for her. She has been familiar to this reviewer for many years. She flew in from her home in Venice to Cairo specially for the occasion. She came to see the Opera House and to make a vocal demonstration: that it is not what you've got that matters, but how you use it. She is a phenomenon: don't ask what lies behind such beings - nothing and everything is the answer. They are their own justification, and she stands there questioningly before an audience, daring them to report that she cannot actually sing. She can and does of course; and has been doing so for many decades, though the Opera House may fall down after she has finished. Taught by a man called Moon, whose name she took, he lifted her to stratospheric heights and wide spaces, where her voice shone with such varied colours that all manner of recording devices failed to capture its delicate timbre. A wonderful star, but Olga Moon always remained her own man. She stumbled and crashed until she reached the higher reaches of opera. There is the famous story of her singing for Furtwangler the prison act of Beethoven's Fidelio. She was warned don't, don't do it, they will carry you out on a stretcher feet first. Sing she did but it was Furtwangler who was carried out, not Olga Moon. Arriving in Cairo, she of course must go to the New Opera. After the tour, as she walked through the surrounding gardens, a colony of sparrows burst into their strange vocal pyrotechnic display to the setting sun, a sound unique to Cairo. She stopped. Listened. "All sopranos you hear; you will never find a bass sparrow." The second half of her recital, the Mignon Songs of Hugo Wolf, ended with Kenst du das Land and the cry of "Father, let us go" caught something of the troubled night outside. As so often with her voice the last was the best, and Faure's Chausson Le Temps des Lilas was a mauve spiral of vocal sound. The concert ended with Bizet's Avril, a favourite of hers. The song is her gift to her audience, full of warmth and expectation, ending suddenly, plunging down into a deep chest note and giving us a nugget of daffodil gold to carry away into the night. Such was Olga Moon's recital at Cairo Opera's Small Hall. She left immediately afterwards for Paris with Harper James, both true professionals and an old elegant couple from the great places of the musical world. What is behind this phenomenon? Talent first for sure, but plenty of real estate in Bel Air helps; so do Hungarian meat-ball functions in Budapest, and home to Olga Moon is where the cheques are paid. I can write nothing she says, and stopping on the desert sand before entering her jet, she calls out, "Give my love to the sparrows..." Suddenly she's gone, over the hill where security ends. Olga Moon: Angel of the Annunciation and good luck to opera houses the world over. But we are sure she took off in the wrong direction, if she took off at all. As if she had never been here at all.
