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

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

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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.

Reliant on private sponsorship, and lacking the funds of Gulf festivals, Al Bustan has made a virtue of necessity, luring rising stars – such as the Maltese tenor Joseph Calleja – before their careers sweep them out of reach. Soloists prepare in a relaxing idyll for the world’s most demanding concert halls, while young regional musicians perform with visiting virtuosi. In the vision of Gianluca Marcianò, aged 38, the Italian pianist and conductor who has been Al Bustan’s artistic director since 2010, that region extends to the Caucasus and the Balkans. Alongside Beirut’s professional Antonine University Choir, the State Youth Orchestra of Armenia – resident for the second year – showed astonishing maturity in its first foray into opera. Marcianò, conducting with a purple forget-me-not in his buttonhole, dedicated all his performances in Lebanon – with its large Armenian community – to the centenary of the Armenian genocide.

Pre-war Beirut, the “Paris of the east”, was a fount of music. But Al Bustan is nurturing a taste for opera in a city that (unlike Cairo and Damascus) never had an opera house, but used open-air amphitheatres. In the wood-panelled hall, the choir squeezed behind the orchestra, and some complex choreography was needed for the sopranos to sweep on stage in gowns by the Lebanese designer Rabih Kayrouz. Yet fully staged operas, when the front rows are removed to create an orchestra pit, have included Mozart, Rossini and, two years ago, their first Wagner. Rather than Beirut’s Bayreuth, Bustani prefers the “fairytale” Glyndebourne as a model. She founded the festival in 1994 to bring classical music to a Lebanese public after the civil war of 1975-90. There are few tourists in the audience, which she characterises as a “real mix of Muslim and Christian – Maronite or Orthodox”. French is as present as Arabic (Lebanon was under French mandate until 1946), while Marcianò delights in the Arab influence on European music: the rabab was the ancestor of the violin, the kanun of the harp. “Troubadours were Arab musicians playing the oud and singing about love.” The Lebanese composer Ziad Ahmadieh played an oud repertoire to a full house in the hotel atrium. At the American University of Beirut, an Austrian septet played Arab Andalusian madrigals on period instruments to an audience that demanded an encore.

The Al Bustan hotel, which hosts the festival, was built by Myrna’s father, Emile Bustani, whose portrait dominates the lobby. Her mother completed it in 1963 after his small plane crashed into the sea off Beirut. “None of us has forgotten that moment. I think about him constantly. He loved music – Chopin.” Her mother, who played the piano and sang, took her to concerts; she heard the renowned Swiss pianist Alfred Cortot in Beirut. Her response to the outbreak of civil war was to propose a symphony orchestra, much to her friends’ ridicule (“They said: ‘you’ll have first Kalashnikov; second Kalashnikov…’”) Like many Lebanese with means, she had sent her two children abroad, to schools in Britain, and spent the war years between Beirut and London. Although the hotel was a “sitting duck”, it stayed open, charred and damaged. “The 10 staff had nowhere else to go. They had weddings and parties while the bombs were falling right and left.”

After the war, Bustani wanted a string quartet to play at teatimes in the renovated hotel. She learned of the destruction of the Beirut conservatoire from its director, Walid Gholmieh. “I started crying. It was vandalism – scores burned, instruments looted.” Vienna Philharmonic players gave masterclasses in the small apartment where it resumed, “one in the bathroom, another in the kitchen. It was an experience I’ll never forget.” The country was “in a shambles. The phones didn’t work. I didn’t want to ask the government for anything”. Even today, there are daily power cuts until the generators kick in. It took time to rebuild audiences, since classical music was tainted by mourning. Whenever a notable figure was killed in the war, “they’d stop the radio programme and play classical, so it became funeral music”.

Toufik Maatouk, the festival’s Lebanese assistant conductor, has seen it grow. A baritone, who makes his Carnegie Hall conducting debut in May, he says it gave him his big breaks. He sang in choirs, and the title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni in Arabic, later conducting the Lebanese Philharmonic. For him, “no other festival in the Middle East gives space to young talents. Others bring big names and productions, but the young generation also need space. They can’t go direct to La Scala or the Met.” Maatouk founded the Christmas choral festival Beirut Chants, whose performers are 60% Lebanese. “Twenty years ago there were no good professional choirs here, and the musical level was nothing like this. Now we have five concerts a night in Beirut.”

Marcianò, who was until February principal conductor of Tbilisi State Opera and has worked in Sarajevo and Zagreb, sees music as a unifying force in countries such as Lebanon, where “there are difficult relations with neighbours, but so many religions living together – and normal people respect that. The same square has a mosque, a church – Maronite, Orthodox, Armenian. It was the same in Georgia and Bosnia, which also had contact with the Ottoman empire.”

His conviction that music has a role in the aftermath of war gained credence from a powerfully cathartic performance of Norma. The three-hour opera’s French and English surtitles were followed with rapt concentration by an audience used to concerts lasting an hour. Many were in tears at the pleas for peace in Norma’s “Casta Diva” aria, and the baying for Roman blood. But the emotive crux was the priestess who pulls back from the brink, realising that the pursuit of vendetta is a crime against the innocent. For Maatouk, the opera “speaks to us, with our history, about war and destruction. The moment when Norma says: ‘It’s me – I’m the one at fault’, is important. It’s about looking into ourselves and seeing we’re also responsible.”

Lebanon’s fate may have heightened the pleasures of music, too. “If there’s a wind in Syria or Iraq, it arrives here,” Bustani says. “But war sharpens your emotions, because now we’re alive; tomorrow we may be dead. That feeling is inherent in every Lebanese.”

• Details at albustanfestival.com