Amal Choucri Catta celebrates the career of pan-piper at the Cairo Opera House Half a century ago he was the greatest pan piper in the world. Tall, elegant and ever so handsome, he had dark hair that never wanted to stay in place and a smile that was as enchanting as a sunny spring morning. Girls started swooning when they saw him caressing his flute and playing his esoteric tunes, eyes closed, seemingly lost in some distant, courtly past. , publicly anointed king of the pan flute has turned into a living legend. I remember seeing him perform with the famous James Last Orchestra in Germany in the sixties of last century: he always got standing ovations and audiences queued for hours to make sure they got their tickets. He was a phenomenon, introducing an ancient wind instrument to the world's most important stages and one that played only a minor role in contemporary music. Pan pipes were used in classical antiquity and are considered to be the ancestor of the flute. They are made in the form of a series of four to 12 or more short, vertical pipes of wood, cane or pottery, fixed side by side and graduated in length to give the pitches of the different notes. The player blows across the open ends, forming soft, velvety sounds, or loud, high pitches. According to Greek mythology, the creator of the pipes was the god Pan, who belonged to the retinue of Dionysus and was often confused with the satyrs because of his physical resemblance to them. His cult was centred in Arcadia, as he was believed to be the son of Hermes, the great Arcadian god. His mother seems to have been Penelope. As for Pan himself, according to mythology he came into the world with the legs, horns and beard of a goat. The slender young man playing a syrinx flute while watching his flocks was developed by painters and artists at a later date. Pan was above all a shepherd god of woods and pastures and the protector of sheep and flocks. He lived on mountain slopes in grottoes where Arcadian shepherds came to worship him. According to Greek mythology, Pan delighted in roving the forests, frisking with nymphs whom he sometimes terrified with his appearance. One day, he was chasing the nymph Syrinx and had nearly caught her when she cried out to her father, a river-spirit, to change her into a reed. Her prayer was granted, much to Pan's disappointment, but he consoled himself by cutting some of the reeds, creating a new kind of flute and giving it the name Syrinx, which later became the pan pipes. Pan was for long confined to the mountains of Arcadia, where he amused himself by giving lonely travelers sudden frights, which are called 'panics' for this reason. He entered Attica at the time of Persian wars and helped to put the Persians to flight; as a result, the Athenians erected a sanctuary to him on the Acropolis in gratitude. From there, the cult of Pan spread throughout Greece and he finally became a kind of universal god. To this day, he remains, with his pipes and his love for music, a god of heavenly music. Pan pipes have since made their way to Asia. In China, where music is related to the social as well as the cosmic order, the five notes of the pan pipes were considered to be symbols of the Emperor, while at the same time corresponding to the five virtues, the five colours, the five elements, five planets and five directions, as well as the four points of the compass, plus the centre. While pan pipes have been neglected by most European composers, they nevertheless appear in the work of Mozart, where they are used by Papageno in The Magic Flute. Debussy created the Flute de Pan, a short piece for flute, in 1912. , celebrated as the reincarnation of the god Pan, has performed with great orchestras worldwide, bringing his ethereal sounds to fascinated audiences everywhere. From 1970 to 1980, his music could be heard in churches and cathedrals in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He appreciates music by Puccini, Verdi, Mozart and Schubert, and he is himself an active composer, focusing on film music, such as for the film Once Upon a Time in America and many others. Zamfir was 14 years old when he moved to the pan-pipe class at the Music Lyceum in Bucharest, Romania, in 1941. He quickly developed a special talent for the instrument and succeeded in expanding the repertoire for the pan pipes from the original 20 pipes, to 25 and then to 30 bamboo pipes. He then left Romania to conquer the world. He finally came to Egypt for two concerts, the first to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the new Cairo Opera House on 5 February in the Main Hall, and the second at the Sayed Darwish theatre in Alexandria on 7 February. During these concerts, Zamfir presented eight different compositions, most of them his own. While he is obviously not as young as he was, he has not lost his charisma nor his visible love for music and for his instrument. Accompanied by the Cairo Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Romanian conductor Ovidiu Balan, a great musician and an impressive conductor with a penchant for telling funny stories between one composition and the next, Zamfir started with Pan gently lamenting in the dreamy Autumn Colours, before becoming vividly engaged in the lively Great String Rhapsody and floating away on the breeze of the Forest Dance. These pieces were followed by The Green Waltz and Tarantella. One could have wished that the concert had gone on for ever. At the end we did get encores, including the famous Hora Staccato, a splendid piece that should be heard more often with the Cairo Symphony, the orchestra doing a lovely job throughout, even if the music was quite new to them and the rehearsals had been insufficient. Nevertheless, maestro Balan managed to get excellent results, and we even heard short pieces from operas and musicals. Now 81, Zamfir was much admired for his phenomenal performance. He played without any kind of interval, not leaving the stage for over 90 minutes. He brought back sweet memories and took his final bow to a standing ovation. with the Cairo Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ovidiu Balan. A concert to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Cairo Opera House, Main Hall, 5 February, and at the Sayed Darwish Theatre, Alexandria, 7 February photo: Sherif Sonbol
