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MUSICBOX: Music for flower power
Western classical music aficionados were recently treated to an elegant and delightful evening organised by the members of World Association of Flower Arrangers (WAFA), featuring local pianists Jehanara Talati and Ayesha Fiaz Uddin, and vocalist Austin Freitas. The programme was held to raise funds for their forthcoming mega event –– World Flower Show –– to be hosted by Pakistan in 2008.
What made the evening even more enjoyable was the fact that Talati provided a background for each composition, either by proffering a history of the writer or the composer or an explanation of the piece to be rendered.
Beginning with piano duets by Talati and Fiaz Uddin, the first four compositions were polonaises by Schubert. The first piece was a polonaise dance, which, as Talati enlightened the audience, was a slow and stately dance when it was introduced in the sixteenth century and later developed into something light and lively. The duets were rendered with ease, depicting two minds obviously in complete cohesion with each other –– perhaps a natural outcome of the teacher and student relationship the two pianists have shared in the past.
Next to be played were Beethoven’s country dances. Eight altogether, they were also presented as duets by Talati and Fiaz Uddin. The former enlightened the audience about how Beethoven had taken the simplest of melodies from folk tunes and turned them into eight lively dances. One could actually imagine the country folk tapping away their toes to the catchy tunes.
The duets were followed by two arias, the first composed by Grieg and the second by Bizet. Fiaz Uddin filled the role of soprano while Talati tickled the ivory. The first song –– Solvejg’s Lied was about a young girl in search of her lover while the second –– Seguidilla from Carmen was about a girl begging a corporal not to kill her lover. It was obvious that Fiaz Uddin is as adept with her voice as she is with her fingers, and she sang the two pieces in a soft and lucid voice.
The next composition played by Talati was Weber’s Invitation to the Waltz. As the pianist played each bar, she paused to explain the conversation taking place between the characters involved: the gentleman seeking a dance, the lady trying to rebuff him, the man persisting and finally achieving success.
After a 10-minute interval, the programme resumed with a duet by Talati and Fiaz Uddin. What with four movements by Greig depicting different moods, the audience was exposed to a variety of emotions ranging from jubilation to extreme sadness.
With two short movements by Austin Freitas, a baritone followed –– one depicted the writer’s affection for the vicar’s daughter, while the other was about a boy plucking a rosebud. But it was in the ensuing duet that Freitas’s deep voice really stirred the audience. Composed by Jamsheer Talati –– the first Pakistani to compose to Schubert’s words –– the heart-rending duet was about a father who is carrying his child in his arms while passing through an eerie forest. The child (words sung by Fiaz Uddin) is petrified that elves will appear out of the forest, and the father keeps trying to pacify him. But by the time they cross the forest, the child has died out of fear. The song was all the more moving since it was sung in English and could be understood by the audience. The evening ended on a chirpy note though, with a nimble piece, a Slavonic dance, composed by Dvorak and played by the two talented ladies.
Overall a well organised event, it was classily conducted by the members of Wafa. Not surprisingly then, the large flower arrangement adorning the stage had also been meticulously designed by a member to look like a musical note. With 500 delegates expected from 30 member countries at the World Flower Show, one can well expect that Wafa will be organising a string of such fund-raising activities for the next couple of years.
It must be stated here that there is added positive fallout of holding such a culturally enlightening event. For at the start of the programme, the enthusiastic but misguided audience had been insisting on clapping at the end of every movement which is very distracting for the performers, but by the time of the interval, they had realised their faux pas and become relatively restrained. A few more such events and we will surely have a gentry well-versed in the nuances of listening to classical western music.
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