Obituary: Amal Choucri Catta (1934-2008) It is with great sadness that the Weekly announces the death of its music and ballet critic, Amal Choucri Catta, whose regular column on music has been appearing on this page since mid 2002, when she took over from our previous music editor, David Blake, who was the Weekly 's music critic from the paper's first issue in February 1991 until his death in February 2002. Indeed, Amal was a close friend of David Blake, a friendship which developed at the Cairo Opera House, as they both religiously attended every single performance of the Cairo Symphony Orchestra and any guest or visiting performances. They both shared an abiding passion for western classical music, supported by their close familiarity and training in international music institutions. Born in Vienna on 21 November 1934 of an Egyptian father and an Austrian mother, Amal studied music from an early age, first in Cairo, where she studied violin under Prof. Panunzio, and then at the Vienna Conservatoire in the early 1950s, where she studied singing under composer Adolf Pauscher. Besides music, Amal was also an accomplished painter who trained at the Academy of Arts in Vienna and held many exhibitions in Europe and North and South America. Upon her return to Egypt in the 1970s, Amal married Choucri Georges Catta, settled in Cairo, and began writing regular music and arts columns for various foreign-language publications appearing in Egypt. Beside Arabic, Amal was fluent in German, French and English, and for 20 years she contributed regular columns to Le Journal d'Egypte and Le Progrès égyptien, among other publications. She has also written a book in French on dance theatre entitled Walid Aouni, dix années d'Egypte, which was translated into Arabic by the Egyptian Book Organisation. Amal was always proud of her role in disseminating the appreciation of the fine arts in this part of the world and of the huge body of reviews she wrote over a period of some 30 years since she came back to live in Egypt. This totaled some seven thousand articles, she used to say proudly. Before her death, Amal was working on compiling a selection of her articles to appear in book form. While her failing health over the past two years, and especially since the death of her husband, slowed down this process, it never prevented her from going to the Opera or writing for the Weekly, something she continued to do right up until last week. In her final reviews Amal showed something of her famed catholicity of taste and of her lively appreciation of music of every sort. She wrote about a visit to Cairo by the Smithsonian Jazz Masterworks Orchestra last week, for example, in which she praised this American ensemble for its "delicious musical cocktail" of works by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. The week before, she found equal enjoyment in a visit to the Cairo Opera House by the Swiss Zuercher Ballet, which performed modern dance pieces to the accompaniment of Bach's Cello Suites. In her review, Amal quoted Wagner to the effect that "Bach's work was the most stupendous miracle in music, and his Cello Suites are considered the pinnacle of the cellist's repertoire." In his performance of three of them, "cellist Jens Peter Maintz's concentration was overwhelming," she wrote, "and it extended out into the hall where it could be felt by the audience, gripped by the instrumental playing as well as dazzled by the dynamic and vibrant performance of the accompanying male and female dancers." We will all sorely miss her contributions to the Weekly and cherish her memory.
