Amal Choucri Catta enjoys two tragic Bizets and one pastoral End of Season Gala Concert. Cairo Opera Orchestra, cond Nader Abbassi, Georges Bizet's L'Arlesienne and Carmen Suites 1 and 2. Main Hall: Cairo Opera House, 3 June 9pm Last Friday Cairene audiences bid farewell to the current season's gala concerts. It has been a lavish season, dedicated to musicals, arias and a variety of composers. It has featured opera stars such as Amira Selim beautifully singing the Aria of the Bells from Leo Delibes' opera Lakme, a part she has just been performing with extraordinary success at the Opera de Rennes, France, and, among the foreign performers, the excellent Italian tenor Celso Albelo and the fabulous Lebanese flautist Wessam Boustany. We were also presented with tangos and concertos featuring a number of brilliant Egyptian soloists, such as pianist Ramzi Yassa and Ahmed Hamdy at the clarinet, tenor Georges Wanis and sopranos Mona Rafla and Dalia Farouk -- to mention just a few of the many who have delighted audiences of this season's gala concerts. Cairo Opera Orchestra's director-conductor Nader Abbassi has been wise and cautious in his choices. Life was not easy for him initially at Cairo's Opera House, and had it not been for his intelligence, his thoughtfulness and his outstanding musicianship, he would not have been able to achieve the success he is now enjoying. His performances are always distinguished, extremely refined and a constant source of pleasure. For his last concert of the season he has chosen four orchestral suites by Georges Bizet, France's master of exoticism who revolutionised opera. Friday night, conducting Cairo Opera Orchestra at the Main Hall, Nader Abbassi opened the concert with L'Arlesienne, Suite No 1, inspired by French author Alphonse Daudet's play. The Prelude, a delicious Allegro, introduces Frederi who is in love with the mysterious "girl from Arles", L'Arlesienne. Having decided to ask for her hand in marriage, he discovers that she already belongs to another man. In despair, Frederi leaves home and mother and abandons Vivette, his lovely bride. The Menuet's Allegro Giocoso evokes his nasty departure and the new life he has chosen for himself among the sunny fields, the green pastures and the blue brooks. Vivette asks him to return to his old, grieving mother, but he refuses, the slow Adagio, a captivating sequence, expressive of his mother's love. She would do anything to get her son back: she would even take the sinful girl from Arles into her home. Deeply touched by his mother's unselfish love, Frederi decides to return and to marry Vivette, thus giving his mother the pure and loving daughter-in-law she deserves. In the Carillon's Allegro Moderato wedding bells chime as Frederi leads Vivette down the aisle. Fate, however, takes a tragic turn. Hearing of the Arlesienne's planned elopement with the "other man", Frederi remembers his passion and, filled with jealousy, sets out to kill his rival. Once again Vivette comes to the rescue, preventing him from committing the crime. In despair, Frederi kills himself while the Carillon's bells announce his death. The first of the two Arlesienne suites captures all the tragic beauty of Daudet's drama, while the second is of a more pastoral nature. Similar to the first, it consists in four movements, opening with a wonderful Andante, descriptive of life in the country, with the Intermezzo depicting the peasants and their relationships, followed by the Menuet and the Farandole, French dances evocative of enchanting feasts in rural regions. Friday night, both suites had as much colour as emotion, as much beauty as sensibility, and the orchestra's solo parts were enchantingly performed. Nader Abbassi carried the entire music in the palm of his left hand, marking the tempi with his passionate baton and giving his audience Bizet as he has seldom been given before. A theatrical genius, Alexandre Cesar Leopold, generally known as Georges Bizet, was born in Paris in 1838, the only child of a Parisian wigmaker turned musician, who had ambitions for his son to become a composer. The son obliged by showing a precocious gift for music. At the age of 10, he entered the Paris Conservatoire, a brilliant student and frequent winner of prizes, including the much sought Prix de Rome. Soon after his 17th birthday, he wrote the sprightly Symphony in C, which lay unknown on a dusty shelf until 1935 when its first performance revealed a world of Schubertian gaiety and exuberant inspiration. Those operas of Bizet which did reach the stage were destined for an ambiguous fate. Such was the case of Djamileh, an opera- comique in an oriental setting, which gained warm support from Massenet and Saint-Söens, who described it as a "pearl cast before swine". Quick- tempered, impulsive, too proud to ask theatre managers for favours, Bizet refused to compromise his artistic principles. Although he strove for success on stage, he was determined to win it on his own terms. Furthermore, his marriage at the age of 31 only added complications to his professional struggles. Living in the topsy-turvy world of the theatre, Bizet was harassed not only by the whims of prima donnas, but also by the fickleness of public taste. One opera that did win through was Les pecheurs de perles in 1863. Three months after the disastrous premiere of Carmen Bizet succumbed to rheumatic fever and two heart attacks. He died in 1875, aged 36, unaware that the failed Carmen was to become one of the best-known operas of all time. His legacy was far-reaching. His gift for subtle characterisation swept away the cardboard figures of French opera which he had revolutionised, replacing snow-white heroines and clean-cut heroes with characters of feeling and passion. The second part of the concert was dedicated to the two orchestral suites from Bizet's Carmen, based on Prosper Merimée's novel. The suites were extracted by Fritz Hoffmann after the composer's death and contain orchestral settings of some of the opera's most famous passages. The first opens with the Torreador's Allegro Moderato, preluding the heroine's tragic fate in solemn dark tones, before introducing the Andante Moderato of Carmen's meeting with the unfortunate Don José. With the military march, sounds of fifes and trumpets announce the arrival of relief guards while soldiers place themselves in a line before the guard house. Michaela, Jose's bride, has come and gone, bearing tidings from the brigadier's mother. Now that she has departed, José has eyes only for Carmen who has thrown a flower at his feet and a smile to his eyes. She is one of the girls working at the cigarette factory, a fascinating temptress who falls in and out of love with unbelievable ease. Following the Seguidilla's Allegretto, the music turns to Don José and his men, with the Dragon d'Alcala's enchanting Allegro Moderato. It is however in the second suite that we encounter many of the opera's famous arias, such as the heroine's solo of Act I, scene 5: L'amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser, or her aria from Act I, scene 10: Sur les remparts de Seville, chez mon ami Lilas Pastia. Here, in the second suite, we likewise encounter the magnificent overture to the opera with Les toreadors, the wonderful violin solo of Michaela's aria and Escamillo's celebrated solo Toreador en garde. Following the Allegro of La garde montante the orchestra presented an exciting version of the Bohemian Dance's Andante quasi Allegretto, bringing the suite to a triumphant close. That night, we had a number of marvelous solos of the violin, the harp, the flute, the woods and the brass -- and the audience loved them all.
