Amal Choucri Catta revels in aria galore Cairo Opera House Small Hall Song Recital: soprano Aya Shalaby, mezzo-soprano Jolie Faizy, tenor Hisham El-Guindy, bass-baritone Hatem El-Ganedy, pianist Nayer Nagui, 2 September Following a musically disappointing summer, opera lovers were delighted to start off the new season last Thursday with a lavish programme dedicated wholly to young singers -- performing alongside the masterful pianist Nayer Nagui. With some 20 arias spontaneously and passionately performed, the recital turned the evening into an occasion to cherish. The concert opened with Felix Mendelssohn's Abschiedslied der Zugvoegel, a moving melody about migrating birds singing their last farewell to their homeland, performed with poetic elegance by Aya Shalaby and Jolie Faizy. In the next song, Flavo's Guapparia, supply interpreted by Hatem El-Ganedy, Nagui was to show a more aggressive aspect of his keyboards. El-Ganedy was charming despite his tendency to shout -- with a little more attention to breathing and elocution, his charm would have found even more favour with the audience. The same goes for all four singers, in fact: if they paid as much attention to their consonants as to their vowels, their diction would be far more appealing, the flow of their singing more powerful. The fault, it should be noted in passing, may be more forgivable in the baritone, who is new to the opera, whereas tenor Hisham El-Guindy has already established himself in a number of performances, notably as Nemorino in Donizetti's The Love Potion. After the aggression of Guapparia came an amorous duet with El- Guindy and Jolie Faizy, the latter in a dramatically black gown. Her increasing assurance notwithstanding, she would benefit from avoiding screaming while on high pitches and working on her consonants at the other end of the scale. El-Ganedy's rendition of Fanciulli's I am the wind, which followed, brought out the full power of his voice, while nonetheless testifying to its monotony. By the time he ended, the nationalist overtones of Dvorak's Als die alte Mutter, spectacularly performed by Aya Shalaby, brought on a welcome change of mood -- and the by now thoroughly missed verve. It was followed by a solo performance by El-Guindy of a song signed Joaquin Turina, and then Faizy's dramatic interpretation of Francis Poulec's Les chemins de l'amour. Thus the first half of the concert closed with a duet, a trio and a quartet from Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore -- with El-Guindy as Nemorino and Shalaby somewhat miscast as Adina (the strong timbre of her voice, which could in fact turn her into a wonderful Wagnerian, would not seem to fit the role), eventually joined by Faizy and El- Ganedy. Charmingly, the four young singers played out the delightful, endearing fairy tale of Dulcamara's love potion and the amorous confusion it causes, concluding with Nomeniro's eventual happy marriage to Adina. A most fitting, and pleasing, end. The second half of the concert started with the fascinating Barcarolle, from Jaques Offenbach's Les contes d'Hoffmann, radiantly rendered by the two emergent divas, following which El-Guindy performed a tune from the Italian composer Francesco Cilea's L'Arlesiana, testifying to the power and appeal of the author of Adriana Lecouvreur, the only opera by Cilea with which Egyptian audiences are likely to be familiar. Here as elsewhere throughout the second half of the concert the singers performed better, having got rid of their stage fright -- they could concentrate confidently on the songs they performed. Much like the Donizetti episode, the perfomances of the second half still showed a lack of direction which, if not for the energy and hard work of the four young stars, might have undermined the audience's overwhelming positive response. Such lack of direction was evident in Shalaby's performance of a tune from Alfredo Catalani's La Wally, in which she did not know what to do with her hands. A rather colourless performance, it was followed by a delightful aria from Puccini's La Bohême, courtesy of El-Ganedy, with Faizy lending credence to a shapely piece from Charles Gounod's Sapho, which had but little success when it first appeared. Faizy seemed to be doing a lot for the French repertoire indeed, with Sapho followed by a duet from Georges Bizet's Pêcheurs de Perles -- with El-Guindy as the fisherman Nadir opposite her practically flawless Leila, the priestess. The applause was extremely warm. Bizet set the scene for Guiseppe Verdi, whose Macbeth and Trovatore provided El-Ganedy and Faizy with the content of the next two pieces, respectively. Shalaby then performed an aria from Dvorak's Rusalka which, based on Fouqué's Undine, shows how inspiring is the Slavonic water spirit. This wonderfully melodious tune paved the way to the famous last scene of Verdi's Rigoletto, performed, again, by all four singers. It started with El-Guindy's solo performance of the celebrated La donna è mobile, a meditation on the fickleness of women he invested with impetuous high-piteched sarcasm -- to the utter delight of the audience. Again, at the end, El-Guindy's rendition of the duke's love song Bella figlia dell'amore was a winning combination of anguish, laughter and complaint. A thrilling end: the audience seemed to realise that, with such promising voices emerging on the scene, Egyptian opera is far from dead.
