Monday, March 06, 2006
Zad Moultaka's concert-as-contest keeps audience guessing

By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Daily Star staff

Review

BEIT MERY: On Saturday night, the Lebanese pianist and composer Zad Moultaka preformed a concert of Mozart and Haydn sonatas that was both meticulous and sharp, and, contrary to one's usual expectations of a serious classical music recital, loose and fun as well. For the Bustan Festival's two-month-long season celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, Moultaka structured his concert as a game. He took two sonatas each by Mozart and Hadyn and mixed up the total of twelve movements.

As he played, a young woman on stage identified the movement by number only, like a ring girl announcing the rounds of a boxing match. Audience members were told to guess the composer of each movement - Mozart or Hadyn - on a slip of paper used later for a raffle with five prizes (the top winner, to the audience's delight, turned out to be a very young boy).

Fun, games and sponsorship opportunities aside, the concert-as-contest actually forced the audience to listen more closely to the music. Mozart's high-note trills have more sparkling clarity, his bass-note booms more melancholy warmth, than Hadyn's more labored pieces, or do they?

To differentiate between them - Mozart's "Sonata for Piano Number 5 in G Minor," composed in 1775, and "Sonata for Piano Number 7 in C Major," composed in 1777, against Hadyn's "Sonata in G Major" and "Sonata in D Major," both from 1780 - proved to be tough. In life and art, Mozart and Hadyn overlapped as often as they diverged. As testament to the difficulty of the task, only five people in the crowd actually got the answers right.

After the intermission, Moultaka played one Hadyn sonata straight and then stepped outside the game and the festival theme to perform the night's triumph - the world premiere of Moultaka's "Omaggio, a Luc Ferrari."

Ferrari, who passed away in August 2005, was a French composer renowned for his techniques with magnetic tape, electro-acoustic experimentation and ambient noise. Influenced by John Cage, Ferrari sought out the sounds of everyday life and incorporated them into his compositions.

In the Emile Boustani auditorium on Saturday, Moultaka - whose name, fittingly enough, means "meeting point" in Arabic - played an electronic version of Ferrari's music pumped through speakers, into which he spliced his own composition.

Playing into the blank spaces of Ferrari's recording, exploring its contours and abstractions, shoulders rocking like a jazzman, Moultaka called attention to music's unique potential to forge dialogue between the living and the dead. More so than any artistic medium, a musical composition allows one to dive directly into the imagination of the composer.

This has long been the Bustan Festival's strength, to match traditional classical music with equally serious, avant-garde and contemporary innovation. Moultaka made good on that reputation this weekend, and made both equally accessible to a wide public while doing so.

Source: The Daily Star