Controversies notwithstanding, Hani Mustafa enjoys the Barenboim concert Until the Gezira exit, where the Opera House lies beyond the Ahly Club and the Football Federation, the October Bridge was all smooth sailing. Suddenly the prospect turned into smoke and red brake lights -- serpentine, the cars crawled for some 300 metres all the way to the Opera gates -- with the cramping giving way only at the last minute. I had taken the precaution of giving myself extra time with the aim of arriving 20 minutes in advance of the Daniel Barenboim concert. But due to the unfortunate combination of the last leg of traffic and my companion taking a wrong turn and arriving too late, by the time we found seats, it was 17 minutes into the event. Thus we were relegated to the balcony, as is the custom with late arrivals, but my anger at said companion eventually subsided. It transpired that all we had missed was Omar Sharif introducing Barenboim on stage -- a strange and largely unheard of innovation in the world of classical music. Barenboim played two Beethoven pieces. It was all I could do to prevent myself from swaying to Sonata Op 8, written for solo piano, the amazing performance of which is widely held to be this musician's most impressive feat. All kinds of passionate thoughts coursed through my head, since I know this piece by heart -- I envied Barenboim, for example, his ability to forge such miracles out of a mere musical instrument, and regretted having learned no instrument myself -- but I managed to hold onto the kind of respectful demeanour expected of an opera goer. At the end of the Sonata, it was my chance to move to the seat reserved for me, closer to the orchestra in the hall. But as it happened tickets had been double-booked and I arrived to find a group of Asian-looking listeners comfortably seated. While waiting for the usher to arrive, I conjectured they must be Japanese, since the Cairo Opera -- designed by a Japanese architect and built with the help of a Japanese grant -- has a strong Japanese contingent in its regular audience. At first I was offered a detachable seat at the edge of the isle, but the man next to me, though apparently calm and peaceful, was huge -- with a strangely glaring expression and an obvious aversion to the solution thus being proposed by the usher. Even when I was seated across from him, I could not let go of the impression that his glare was still on me, and I concluded that he must be among the body-gaurds of one of the diplomats or dignitaries present: I knew that the Austrian and Spanish ambassadors as well as Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni were there, together with numerous senior figures. The one question I could not get over was why Barenboim should be conducting the Cairo Symphony Orchestra now, in 2009, when he did not do so in the company of Edward Said (whose own virtuosity at the piano was apparently near professional), with whom he founded the East-West Diwan Orchestra. The answer, as it seemed to me, must be related to Hosni's UN Secretary General candidacy (an attempt to boost his position in the elections next October), since Hosni had been widely accused of anti-semitism and narrow-mindedness in the west following a statement one journalist provoked him into making last year, to the effect that, should he find a single Israeli book in the Ministry of Culture, he would personally burn it. Since then Hosni's attempt to clear his name in the west has been fraught with difficulty, because any question of association with Israel at any level routinely brings upon him the wrath of the more conservative elements in the unified-stand-against-Israel discourse: religious zealots, leftists, and the vast majority of the population. Barenboim was the perfect wager since his position and person had already been sanctioned by Edward Said, a widely revered symbol of the Palestinian cause. This turned the minister's battle from that of a pro-normalisation agent against the anti-normalisation majority into the battle of a progressive intellectual with more conservative agents. I imagined that many of those present were not there for love of classical music per se (as I claim to have been) but either to bolster up Hosni's decision to invite Barenboim or demonstrate their newly nuanced anti-normalisation stand (whereby a figure like Barenboim, who has frequently taken a stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and the excesses of the Israeli Army, is thought to be welcome). "Yes," he told the audience in heavily accented English at the end of the concert, "my parents took me in 1952 to live in Israel, yes I lived and studied there, I studied music that you appreciate tonight, but I am sick to my guts every day I wake up knowing that the Palestinian territories are still occupied." I had missed the opportunity to watch Barenboim's piano performance at close range, but the orchestra under his baton more than made up for this loss as I noticed primo violinist Yassir El-Serafi standing on stage, tuning his instrument and motioning to the orchestra to tune theirs accordingly. The sheer power of the opening of Beethoven's Symphony Op 5 filled me with terror and joy while Bareboim signalled to the orchestra to start as if he was launching a battle. At the end of each movement, some audience members attempted to applaud -- contrary to the conventions of opera -- and so the final applause was truly tremendous, forcing the maestro to bow many times in succession. According to convention, he saluted Serafi, then the orchestra, but then Barenboim shook hands with each and every member of the orchestra and faced the audience again, in a rare instance of a conductor addressing his audience; and his words generated almost as much enthusiasm in the hall. "They," he announced, referring to those who had criticised his presence. "They are against something I do not represent."
