Amal Choukri Catta spent the holy month listening to classical music Symphonic concerts went on as before during Ramadan, attracting as big an audience as ever. Indeed the last few weeks witnessed a rich plethora of well-attended performances by the Cairo Symphony and Cairo Opera Orchestras at the main hall of the Cairo Opera House and Alexandria's Sayed Darwish Theatre. Of these the German National Day Concert, sponsored by the Embassy of Germany and the Goethe Institute to open the ongoing German Festival, was among the most impressive. With Thomas Kalb conducting the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, the evening opened with Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A, KV 622, with the remarkable Martin Spangenberg for soloist. The concerto is a work of drama and wit, a masterpiece of rare perfection. It is Mozart's last completed work, following close on the heels of the two great operas The Magic Flute and La Clemenza di Tito. Whether or not he realised it was his swansong, the concerto has an elegiac quality over and above its exemplary classical balance and aesthetic poise. It brings to mind, more than anything else, a polished jewel, with impeccably symmetrical facets forming a perfect crystal, with a myriad of colours gleaming through the brilliant surface. A challenge for clarinetists, one to which Spangenberg's breathtaking performance lived up. The soloist's virtuosity was further established when, presenting Stravinsky's Three Pieces for Clarinet Solo, he granted his audience yet another feat of artistic excellence. With the second part of the concert dedicated to Richard Strauss' symphonic poem Don Juan and the overture to Wagner's Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Spangenberg and Kalb (neither, incidentally, are newcomers to the Cairo stage) demonstrated the full extent of their prowess. Conducted by Mustafa Nagui, the Turkish Concert, another Cairo Symphony Orchestra offering, proved rather more heterogeneous, so much so that the choice of fare seemed somewhat ill considered at times. No one understood, for example, why the concert was preluded with Leonard Bernstein's overture to Candide, a musical usually (and, one must say, better) performed by the Cairo Opera Orchestra. In fact Candide had been staged by the latter, under the excellent baton of Nader Abbassi, only a week before. A demanding piece, this time round the overture would have benefited from more rehearsal time: the musicians seemed unsure of themselves and were generally not up to the challenge. Yet the concert had a new and fabulous highlight: Turkish pianist Idil Biret, who fascinated the audience with a superb rendition of Chopin's Second Piano Concerto in F-minor, Opus 21. Biret has all the brilliance, sensitivity, ardour and exaltation of the virtuoso. She was only three when she manifested an astounding gift for music, and was trained at the Paris Conservatoire under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger, graduating at 15 with three first prizes before continuing her studies with Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff. She has given concerts throughout the world with the most impressive orchestras and conductors. She has over 70 recordings, including the complete concertos of Chopin, Rahmaninov and Brahms. A great lady of the piano, she enraptured her audience with the powerful maestoso of the concerto's first movement, before delving into the exquisitely ornamented melody of the largetto and closing with the extraordinary pianistic figurations of an imposing allegro vivace. The audience, enchanted, would never let her go; and she smilingly obliged with two encores. The concert closed triumphantly with Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in E-minor, Opus 64, a great favourite with the Cairo Opera crowd. Nagui's utter brilliance ensured that, by the end, the audience was wild with excitement. The first of a string of concerts dedicated to the Brahms cycle, the Tenth of Ramadan Concert, took place on 23 October. Under the baton of Christoph Mueller, the Cairo Symphony Orchestra presented Robert Schumann's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in A-minor, Opus 54, with the young Egyptian pianist Mohamed Shamseddin. Born in 1984, the 20-year-old soloist was a child prodigy, the winner of the Supreme Council's piano competition for children in 1996. He made his debut around the age of 13, playing Mozart's Twentieth Piano Concerto with the Academy of Arts Symphony Orchestra. The winner of local and foreign competitions, he was granted a scholarship to attend the Brevard Music Centre in North Carolina, USA, where he studied with the celebrated pianist Douglas Weeks, winning the first prize of the third Brevard Music Festival piano competition in 2000. Shamseddin has been applauded frequently for both recitals and concerts, yet this time he did not manage to make Schumann's concerto as appealing as it might have been. The soloist's fingers darted nimbly over the keys, delivering buoyant allegra vivace after lovely allegro and graceful andantino, but his art was not in the Schumann. And technical brilliance could not make up for the soullessness of the performance. According to prior announcements, the concert should have opened with Max Reger's Ballet Suite, Opus 130. For some obscure reason, however, Reger was replaced by Dmitri Shostakovich's Festival Overture, Opus 69, a somewhat light-hearted work, compared to symphonies and other works by the composer, which show emotional extremes, tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, a savage parody underlining humour and sarcasm. It is often said that the scherzo of Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony is a portrait of Stalin, written a year after the dictator's death. Ostensibly a celebration of the October Revolution, the Festival Overture turns out to be a simple, jubilant work, unique in Shostakovich's output. With the maestro well in command, the orchestra gave a gratifying performance. Mueller, the orchestra's new, resident conductor, is visibly accumulating power, which he deploys with wisdom and refinement. He has stopped verbally addressing the audience, for one thing: far more eloquent and convincing is his use of well- performed music. The second part of the concert was duly dedicated to Johannes Brahms, with his First Symphony in G-Minor, Opus 68, conducted without a score. Critical abuse by his contemporaries, and notably by other composers, has not affected the modern view of Brahms as one of the greatest composers in history, and one of the three Big B's (the other two being Bach and Beethoven). A lesser B composer, Benjamin Britten, claimed he played through the whole of Brahms at intervals to see whether he was as bad as Britten thought, only to end up discovering that he was actually much worse. Paul Dukas, too, dismissed Brahms with "too much beer and beard", while Hugo Wolf lamented his failure to exalt, and Tchaikovsky described him as "a gift- less bastard". None of this could stop Brahms from being, unarguably, one of the giants of classical music. He was 43 before he felt able to handle symphonic form satisfactorily; and hailed as "the greatest first symphony ever written", his epic debut led critics to compare him with Beethoven, spotting the similarity between the second scene of the Finale and Beethoven's Ode to Joy. Born in Hamburg in 1833, Brahms died in Vienna in 1897, aged only 64. He too was a child prodigy. His father, an impecunious double bass player in Hamburg taverns, eventually made it into the Hamburg Philharmonic. The family lived in St Pauli, near the famous Reeperbahhn red-light district, where the local prostitutes were not only neighbours but friends. (In later years he would have many affairs with respectable women, though it was always to the unrespectable ones that he returned.) As soon as he was proficient enough to manage it, Brahms followed his father into the taverns of Hamburg, to earn a living of his own. He made his debut in Hamburg in 1848, proving himself a master of every musical form except opera, which he never attempted. His four symphonies are superb examples of his devotion to the architecture of classical music, into which he introduced thematic developments. His first symphony was perhaps Mueller's greatest triumph to date. The Cairo Symphony Orchestra was to return under Mueller with a Second Brahms Cycle, a programme comprising music by the Egyptian Gamal Abdel-Rehim and the Swiss Frank Martin, with bass baritone Charles Mays performing Six Monologues from Jeddermmann. Born in Geneva in 1890, the son of a Protestant pastor, Martin died in Holland in 1974. He studied science and mathematics before concentrating on music, which he studied in Geneva and elsewhere. He had wide-ranging musical interests, and in 1926 founded the Society for Chamber Music in Geneva. In 1928 he was appointed professor at the Jacques- Delcroze Institute while at the same time teaching at the Geneva Conservatoire and the Technicum Moderne de Musique, which he founded in 1930. His Six Monologues, from Hugo von Hoffmannsthal's Everyman, are a swansong in which, suddenly, a rich man finds himself surrounded by death: "The feast of joy has ended" and "Oh God, how terrified I am of death"; followed by "As if someone has called" and "Thus I am totally annihilated". So the rich man sings, trying to save himself; in the end he turns to God, the only redeemer: "Yes, I believe such deeds are His". He closes with "Oh Eternal God, Oh Divine Faith". Mays, from Washington DC, offered a perfect interpretation of the drama, vocally evoking the rich man's anguish, his terror of death and, later, the peace that faith induces in him. While Mays' powerful voice soars beautifully in the silent hall, the rich man has accepted his faith, realising that death will bring him salvation. Abdel-Rehim's Little Suite for Strings, based on five works of particularly lustrous character, opened the concert, while the second part of the programme comprised Brahms' Second Symphony in D-major, Opus 73. Mueller was once again able to conduct without making use of a score, and the concerto was as brilliantly performed as the previous one. Wandering from the simple grace of the first movement through a somewhat obscure adagio, the concerto lingers on a colourful allegretto before culminating in an exuberant allegro conspirito. The orchestra was remarkable enough to leave the audience awe-inspired and Mueller delighted. Ovations were definitely in order, and they seemed appropriately abundant. The Cairo Opera Orchestra, conducted by Massimo Pradella from Italy, opened the Fête de l'amour Concert, with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony in A-major, Opus 92, an exquisite, many- hued work premiered in December 1813 at a charity concert for Austrian and Bavarian soldiers wounded at the battle of Hanau. The four movements were sufficient to establish the power of Pradella who offered a brilliant rendition. Born into an artistic family from Venice, this maestro studied piano and violin at the Santa Cecilia Conservatoire, graduating at a very young age. He began his career as violist and composer, turning to conducting, which he studied with the famous Bruno Walter, only later. He made his debut as conductor in 1954, with the National Orchestra of Santa Cecilia, and has since conducted some of the most important orchestras worldwide. His operatic repertoire started in Cairo in 1958 with Nozze di Figaro and La Traviata at the old Cairo Opera House. Local opera lovers were therefore delighted to see a long familiar face at the new opera house, and the show proved all the more interesting for his presence. The second part of the concert opened with three vocal performances. First mezzo soprano Hanan El- Guindi offered "Habanera" from George Bizet's Carmen. Her voice is lovely, her technique astounding, but she is not Carmen; Cairo Opera's greatest Amneris will be neither a vagabond nor a man chaser. Next came soprano Tahiya Shamseddin, giving a charming performance of the aria "Je veux vivre" from Charles Gounod's Romeo and Juliet. Last but by no means least soprano Iman Mustafa and tenor Walid Korayem delivered a gratifying rendition of the duet from Puccini's Madame Butterfly. The concert drew to a close with three Slavonik dances by Antonin Dvorak, a vivacious end to this feast of love. The audience loved the maestro, particularly his idiosyncratic way of waiting for the very last work on show to close before bowing theatrically.
