Al Bustan – the classical music festival in Beirut that survives war and assassinations

[Surya Gayatri]

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/11/al-bustan-classical-music-festival-beirut


Carmen Giannattasio (in red) duets with Nino Surguladze in a concert performance of Bellini’s Norma at the festival. Photograph: Al Bustan

Ten years ago, on the eve of Lebanon’s only winter festival of classical music, a truck bomb on the Beirut seafront killed the prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and 21 other people. The opening concert was cancelled. But the next night an Estonian choir performed as planned in a church, in what became a memorial service for the dead and a defining moment of cultural defiance.

The assassination in 2005 was the Al Bustan festival’s darkest hour, its founder, Myrna Bustani, tells me. “It was like Kennedy; it not only killed Hariri, but people’s hope.” Attendance plummeted, not out of fear but because Beirutis took to the streets. Visiting musicians joined in the peaceful protests of the “cedar revolution”. “They came back at three in the morning wearing the Lebanese flag,” Bustani recalls. “They joined the demonstrations that finally got the Syrians out of the country. The musicians were elated.”

The opening concert was the only one to be cancelled in 22 years of the five-week festival for chamber music, symphony orchestras and opera. Al Bustan (Arabic for “garden”) has never missed a year – or had to relocate, like the Baalbek summer festival near the Syrian border, despite the sharp deterioration in security in parts of Lebanon since the Syrian uprising began in 2011. Bustani, aged 77, who was Lebanon’s first woman MP in the 1960s, says: “Every year there’s some crisis and we say: ‘My God, are we going to carry on?’ and we always do.”

This year, an intimate concert performance of Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma held an audience spellbound. Beit Meri, a hilltop refuge from summer heat for well-to-do Beirutis, is an apt location for an opera set in Roman-occupied Gaul. On a neighbouring hilltop, beside an incense-filled Maronite church, are the Roman ruins of Deir el-Qalaa, its mosaics and fallen columns fragments of a temple. The Italian soprano Carmen Giannattasio debuted as the Druid priestess Norma, the bel canto role she is studying for the Beijing opera house. In the 450-seater basement auditorium, she sang sublime duets with the Georgian mezzo Nino Surguladze. The Mexican tenor Arturo Chacón-Cruz and Georgian bass Gocha Datusani were also exceptional. Other soloists at this year’s festival included the concert pianists Oliver Poole and Khatia Buniatishvili, and violinists Arabella Steinbacher, Sergei Krylov and Sergey Smbatyan – the young Armenian fresh from conducting with Pinchas Zukerman in Moscow.

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'La musique adoucit les mœurs'

"Music has charms to soothe a savage breast" ~ William Congreve, Mourning Bride (1697)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Congreve