“One of the things symphony orchestras do well is build bridges, creating bonds through music,” writes David Mermelstein in Wednesday’s (1/20) Wall Street Journal. “That was certainly a goal when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Leonard Slatkin, commissioned the young Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz to write a concerto for Maya Beiser, an Israeli-American cellist. The resultant work, ‘Desert Sorrows,’ received its premiere on Jan. 14…. This exuberant concerto … embraces various musical traditions, particularly the Arabic modes known as maqam…. In the opening movement, ‘Yowm Ad-Dīn’ (‘Day of Reckoning’), rhapsodic figurations in the cello … recall Elgar’s and Dvořák’s great concertos for this instrument…. The concerto’s third and final movement, ‘Jannāt’ (‘Heavens’), is dedicated to Prince Saud al-Faisal, the longtime Saudi foreign minister who died in July and whom Mr. Fairouz considered a mentor. Rhythmically urgent and ecstatically expressive, the music connotes some of Leonard Bernstein’s and Aaron Copland’s more upbeat scores without at all aping them, rising to a joyous dance with Middle Eastern flourishes. It’s new music like this—unapologetic in its mass appeal yet not pandering—that will keep audiences in seats, get them cheering afterward and (most important of all) compel them to return to the concert hall.”
Posted January 22, 2016
Photo of Mohammed Fairouz by Samantha West
