Loading ...Syrian themes at London’s Royal Opera House - FT.com
At a café in Kraków, on Europe’s largest medieval market square, the composer Zaid Jabri points towards the source of an abortive bugle call. Up in the gothic watchtower of the Mariacki church, the trumpeter’s melody breaks off, Jabri says, to honour the legendary death of a 13th-century bugler sounding the alarm under Tatar invasion. Played hourly to all points of the compass, the call harks back to an era when the Polish royal city was the hub of medieval trade routes from the Baltic to Venice and the Orient.
Asked whether the hejnał, Kraków’s strangled signature tune, has found its way into his music, Jabri says: “I never do quotations.” Yet Damascus-born Jabri, who though Syria’s most internationally feted composer has lived in Poland for 20 of his 39 years, has found ways to reconnect the old routes. His early setting of A Mirror for the Clouds, by the Syrian modernist poet Adonis, was sung in Polish by Elżbieta Towarnicka — the soprano for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours film trilogy. Composed “in retrograde, like Bach, like a mirror”, where the end of the piece was a reverse copy of the beginning, it won joint first prize at the Adam Didur Composers’ Competition in 1997. When Jabri taught the piece to the rising Syrian-Armenian soprano Talar Dekrmanjian, she sang the Polish in Damascus and in her home town of Aleppo.
Source: www.ft.com