Greek and Turkish Mediterranean neighbours provided musical delights at the Cairo Opera House this week, writes Eric Walberg The Cairo Opera House hosted two concerts of interest this week with Turkish and Greek orchestras bringing their countries' classical music to Cairo, with repeat performances planned for the Alexandria Opera House. The concert of Turkish classical music on 9 June featured music by Ahmet Adnan Saygun and Ulvi Cemal Erkin, prominent members of the "Turkish Five," a group of composers born in what was then the Ottoman Empire in the first decade of the 20th century and who later became part of Turkey's drive to modernise under the republic declared in 1923. Kemal Atatèrk himself personally encouraged them to study in the West and to adopt western approaches to musical composition. Naci Ozguc conducted the Istanbul State Symphony Orchestra in performances of Saygun's first piano concerto and Erkin's Kocekce Suite, as well as in Franz Liszt's symphonic poem "Les Preludes". However, the highlight of the concert was undoubtedly Saygun's piano concerto, ably played by Hande Dalkilic, one of Turkey's most promising young musicians, who has toured widely and recorded several CDs, including one of this concerto. Before performing the work, she said a few words about it. The first movement is programmatic, she explained, evoking the bombing of Izmir in Anatolia that Saygun heard as a child during the Greek occupation following the break up of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1. The second movement takes its inspiration from lyrical song, to which the composer adds a folk element by picking one note out of the scale and weaving a melody around it in Turkish mode. The finale is a playful rondo "à la turque," replete with Saygun's characteristic references to folklore. The influence of his studies in Paris with Vincent d'Indy is also clear. In this work, Saygun achieves the distinction of appealing equally to the intellect and to the emotions. It has been said that he is to Turkey what Jean Sibelius is to Finland, Manuel de Falla is to Spain, and Bela Bartok is to Hungary -- the latter three composers all being 20th- century musicians who combined modern musical styles with national, even nationalistic, elements drawn from folklore. Saygun does something similar for modern Turkish music by blending western and Turkish musical elements in order to produce fresh, compelling and original sounds in music written in an accessible modernist style. In the same way that Atatèrk created a new national identity for the Turkish peoples of the former Ottoman Empire, Saygun found his role in developing the cultural work that Atatèrk had begun. Saygun first rose to international prominence with his oratorio Yunus Emre, based on poems by a mediaeval Sufi mystic. The work was first performed in Ankara in 1946 and was then performed in 1958 in the General Assembly hall of the United Nations in New York under conductor Leopold Stokowski. The success of this performance encouraged Saygun to compose further large-scale works for orchestra, notably his piano concerto which he wrote in 1952 and revised in 1958. Today, he is considered to be Turkey's greatest western-influenced composer, and Hande Dalkilic, the soloist in the Cairo performance of the piano concerto, is a professor at the Saygun Music Research Centre at Bilkent University in Ankara. Dalkilic is considered to be one of the greatest contemporary champions of Saygun's music, having premiered the composer's final work, the Opus 76 piano sonata. She has also recorded CDs of his piano music. As if this rarely performed Turkish material were not enough to keep Cairo's music lovers happy in the first few weeks of June, on12 June the Opera House hosts a performance of chamber music by Mikis Theodorakis, Greece's most celebrated contemporary composer, played by the orchestra that was founded in his honour in 1997 to perform and record both his serious and his more popular works. Cairo's Opera House hosted enjoyable performances of Theodorakis's ballet Zorba the Greek last year, and this will now no doubt become part of the ballet company's repertoire. It was a pleasing set of circumstances that brought both Turkish and Greek musicians to Egypt in the same week to give performances of modern and contemporary Turkish and Greek music and to present works by the greatest modern Turkish and Greek composers to Egyptian audiences in Cairo and Alexandria.
