The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra is about to appoint a music director. Well-informed sources have whispered the name to Slipped Disc.
It’s going to be Han-na Chang, the Korean cellist, who has been upgrading her career as music chief conductor of the Bavarian Youth Orchestra, She has also been taking lessons from that past master of orchestral management, Lorin Maazel, who conducted Qatar’s opening concert (a bad night: I was there) and has kept a weather eye on its progress ever since.
The orchestra, made up mostly of European musicians, aims to reach international rank. Competition is hotting up locally, with a new orch in neighbouring UAE, so the choice of music director is crucial.
Chang is a world-class cellist, with several EMI releases, and a big personality. She studied with Rostropovich and Misha Maisky and has a rather nice way of getting her own way.
As a woman to leading an orchestra in the Arab world, she could give a whole new twist to the Arab Spring. And what she does in the role with her dress code will give the orchestra more global publicity than a fleet of Hollywood PRs.
Just watch those fireworks go up when they read this in South Korea.
And here she is conducting:
Correction: the first woman to be named Music Director of an Arab Orchestra was Dr. Ines Abdel Dayem, when she held that position in Cairo Symphony Orchestra a few years ago. She is now Chairwoman of Cairo Opera House. Several women held top music positions in Egypt before her: Dr. Samha El Kholy was Dean of Cairo Conservatoire in the 1970s and 1980s, then President of the Academy of Arts in the 1980s. Dr. Ratiba El Hefny was Dean of the Arabic Music Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, then Chairwoman of Cairo Opera House in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Thank you in advance for posting an “erratum”.
Thank you; I will adjust the headline and content.
I’m not sure why all the fuss (and unspoken sub-text) about the gender of an “Arab” orchestra’s music director, but for those who attach meaning to it, worth mentioning that the conductor (no, not music director) of the Palestine Youth Orchestra’s excellent 2012 concerts was Sian Edwards.
Really?? I have a hard time coming up with any women principal conductors in a Western orchestra let alone a woman conductor/musical director in a region known principally for its inequality and restrictive mores regarding women in the Arab world. Also, conductor and music director are used interchangeably.
Hello Efrim,
No, “conductor” and “music director” are by no means interchangeable; indeed in some cases the “artistic [music] director” is not even a musician (e.g., the LPO). But I think we have no argument on the actual issue of gender discrimination. Perhaps my posting was not clear.
“…has a rather nice way of getting her own way.” “Getting her own way”? Somehow that strikes me as a strange turn of phrase. Would you ever say that about a man?
No, I’d say “getting his own way” and I’d say it without a second thought.
Sarah, I understand the implications in your comment and find Mwnyc’s response somewhat disingenuine. A conductor has to be an assertive person, and yet assertiveness in women is often categorized differently than it is for men.
Yes I had mixed feelings too when reading the header and first thought why not give the name of the person instead of ‘woman’. Then realising that I am assured that Norman always intends things well, and after having read some of the comments, I thought that you could read it as the opposite of condescending, as I initially felt inclined to read it. Given the scarcity of women in principal positions in Western orchestral culture, be it as conductor or artistic director, one could read it as Qatar sets an example for the West.
But another important correction is that more than half of the orchestra consists of Middle-East musicians, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians, maybe a Jordanian or Palestinian here and there some of whom have been member of Danial Barenboim’s West-East Divan Orchestra. I have seen the orchestra performing several times, for instance doing Ravel and Bruckner under Mark Minkowski. It is a good orchestra, handicapped by the mediocre acoustics of the Doha Operahouse acoustics.
And no, as of yet there is no serious continuous classical orchestra in the UAE. Attempts have been made, but they did not succeed until now. Oman has one, mostl made up of Omani musicians, so that is different from the system in Qatar, where there is no Qatari in the orchestra. (There are too few Qataris to recruit from, plus Qatar until recently was a very conservative society, and moreover everybody is said to be born with a golden spoon in their mouth, as they say, so why would parents bother to send their children to music lessons; there is a modest academy for Arabic music, but here the same considerations are valid, many students are expat kids.) Anyhow, the Oman orchestra was founded by the current Sultan in the eighties and he gradually built it up. Actually it more or less was the system of El Sistema. Oman is much less rich per capita of citizen than Qatar or the UAE as it has less oil. By the way Venezuela has a lot of oil too, maybe even the largest reserve in the world at the moment, and still there is a lot of poverty. Anyway the oil pays or El Sistema, that is for sure.
It’s lovely, of course, that some of the small and wealthy oil states on the Persian Gulf are wiling to spend all this money on Western orchestral music. But the Arab world has its own old and formidable tradition of art music, and it would make me sad to know that Qatar, Oman, the Emirates, etc. were spending lots of money on Western classical music but not supporting the great musical art that comes from their own civilization.
(Imagine if, say, Switzerland were spending lots of public money on Japanese gagaku or Javanese gamelan or Chinese opera while largely ignoring symphony orchestras.)
Does anyone here know the state of Arabic art music in the Gulf states?
Yes, I do, I worked there and I work there (having programmed the Sounds of Arabia festival in Abu Dhabi and soon giving a course on music from the Egyptian cultural renaissance during the 19th and early 20th century and a course on traditional Gulf music, both at New York University Abu Dhabi, and having networked in the other countries). There is certainly substance in your point.
BUT
- There orchestras of Abu Dhabi and Muscat (the only two fully professional full orchestras in the Gulf states; Teheran has two too and Baghdad has one) also accompany Arab (in the case of Teheran Iranian) singers and soloist, for instance in the Gulf Amal Maher and Marcel Khalife, which is facilitated by the fact that at least half of their members are of Arab (mostly Egyptian, Syrian and Lebanese origin)
- The orchestra of Doha is fully imported, no indigenous Qataris, but the orchestra in Muscat is fully Omani; in the eighties Oman started a model comparable to that of Venezuela’s El Sistema and that system is still running
- In fact only a minority of the inhabitants of many of these countries is indigenous and not all expats there are Arab
- in their current cultural-political views the rulers of these states see themselves as ‘global’; perhaps mostly because of the fact that these outskirts of the Arab world (always closer to India, Persia and Africa in terms of transportation before modern highways and planes) because of the oil boom jumped from laid back coastal cultures and harsh desert life to unimaginable luxury made them skip the phase of an indigenous urbanised culture; so like Abu Dhabi is now building a Louvre and a Guggenheim and a Zaha Hadid futuristic concert hall and Doha is doing similar projects (and even its splendid Museum of Islamic Art contains zero objects originating from the Gulf states itself, only Syria, Egypt, Iran, India, Turkey, Uzbekistan, etc.) it wants to be a global player in music itself; but I admit that in the case of symphonic culture there are discrepancies, to my opinion partly due to concert venues lacking good acoustics, although the Muscat Opera House fared better, and the managements seem to still looking for the right formulas to reach audiences – it is great to have Minkovski in Qatar, but he used the opportunity to try his luck on Bruckner IV and together with the acoustics of the hall, the fact that Minkovski is not a Brucknerian and the in fact unattractiveness of the piece to a not yet fully initiated audience, especially with the unassuming acoustics, made this concert a questionable experience. But they try. Yesterday they had a concert for string ensemble, with an Arabic piece I dont know and Mozart and Rota, ending in Verklärte Nacht.
http://qatarphilharmonicorchestra.org/events/chamber-music-series-transfigured-night/
This is their website.
Abu Dhabi for a while in the series Abu Dhabi Classics invited orchestras from all over the world, including the NY Philharmonic, the Koninklijk Concertgebouw Orchestra (doing Siegfried Idyll and Mahler V), the Bavarian State Orchestra, under an unidiomatic Hengelbrock, with Nina Stimme, Klaus Vogt, Petra Lang a.o. in Wagner highlights incl. Liebestod, etc., but also the BBC orchestra doing a New Year’s concert for the more lighthearted, etc. But the governmental organisation that organised this had financial problems and the series was discontinued. However Zaha Hadid’s spectucular performing arts hall next to the Louvre, Guggenheim and other museums will need musical content. But that will not open before 2018, 2019. The economic downturn and maybe worries about where to get audiences and spectators for all these venues have slowed down the ambitious plans.
Anyhow to come back to the topic, these orchestras are not fully alienated from their surroundings. The fact that almost everything in the Gulf is being built from scratch gives opportunities, and, sometimes somewhat dualistic, the region does not want to be typically Arabic only. And due to the mix in the population it isnt.
Correction, when counting the names of the Doha orchestra I overestimated the amount of members of Arab origin.
http://qatarphilharmonicorchestra.org/about-us/musicians/
One more remark: so the Arabic music as most of it would know it, the music from Cairo, Lebanon and Syria, with Umm Kulthumm, Feiruz, Asmahan, Farid Al Atrash, Abdelhalim Hafez, Warda, etc., originally is as almost alien to most of the Gulf communities as Western classical. Compare it to the position of Verdi and Rossini music in Northern-Europe or the US. This has become part of our culture now, but you can’t say it is native. And into the early twentieth century large parts of the Northern-European and US population did not even had the chance to hear it.
Neil, thanks very much for all these informative comments!
Thanks for your thanks.
Sometimes women are better represented in Islamic orchestras than in Western ones. The Istanbul Philharmonic has a large number of women. Perhaps the Istanbul Phil could send a delegation to Austria to help the Vienna Philharmonic better include women….
The same would go for the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, the (probably by now defunct) Damascus symphony orchestra (artistic director Maria Arnaout), the Qatar Philharmonic and even the Teheran Symphony Orchestra and the Iran National Orchestra.
It’s interesting how gender concepts in music are often not appropriated when musical styles are transferred to other cultures. Apparently no one ever told the Japanese that girls aren’t supposed to play brass instruments. Listen to this *astounding* video clip of a Japanese Jr. High band and note that over 90% of the players are girls, including all four members of the trombone section and all three tubists.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyZnIzoqjfA
Conversely, Westerners never seemed to understand the women aren’t supposed to play the shakuhachi.
Article on the arts in Qatar in general including the Qatar Philharmonic, from the Independent.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/can-billiondollar-investments-put-qatar-on-the-cultural-map-8215542.html