Amal Maher breaks hearts at opening Holland Festival #hf10

 Text Wijbrand Schaap; Illustration Kids-n-fun

Valhalla. Someone called it, and indeed: Valhalla. I don't mean the Teutonic version of the Eternal Hunting Fields then, but Miss Asterix and Obelix. Egyptian style. You may colour in the picture yourself with dark curls, unimaginably flawless skin made of very creamy milk chocolate and that then set on a pair of hidden heels and strapped into a corset that adds to everything of value. So Amal Maher is one of those women for whom a man will gladly put his chimes at the disposal of science, if it gives him the privilege of being around her for a few moments.

Amal Maher, equipped with body shapes where Marilyn Monroe evaporates and with a voice that makes you explore all the caverns of sensuality, opened the Holland Festival 2010. Without the queen, who had fled to Norway. And Amal Maher sang a tribute to Arab legend Oum Koulthoum, a woman who, the film footage on the backdrop showed, was far behind her in beauty, but who was perhaps her superior in technique and sound. Oum Koulthoum died sometime in the 1970s and her songs are still on everyone's lips.

In the Arab world, that is. Because melody-wise, we Westerners do have a problem when it comes to singing along, despite that nice clip from the Holland Festival.

And there we get straight to the rather bizarre essence of this slightly provocative action by festival director Pierre Audi, himself of Lebanese descent and thus raised with the music of Koulthoum. This music and singing are among the best the Arab world has to offer. Technically, it is terribly difficult and should therefore be listened to silently, yet the sensuousness compels the audience to sing and clap along wildly. And that, according to the honoured audience in the silent compartment on the first ten rows of Theatre Carré, is not appropriate. The grey section of the invited guests reacted somewhat contemptuously to the cheering, clapping and cheering of the many headscarfed spectators on the further offstage rows of Carré. Perhaps also a little disconcerted, that girls and women in headscarves could be so out of their minds about a woman standing so undisguised sensually on stage.

We still have some things to learn from each other.

And then we also talk about that music. Anyone who occasionally listens to a mop of Bach will be strangely surprised by the Arabic classics. Whereas Bach was very ingenious with all kinds of melodies running against each other and through each other, Arabic music has for decades adhered to the iron law that only one melody is played, preferably by as many instruments as possible at the same time in as clearly defined a pattern as possible. To Westerners, this sounds strange, especially if it is then performed by an orchestra that seems to consist of mere dodgy extras from all the films starring Omar Shariff.

Every violin is amplified and the whole mix has been put through a reverb machine. Weird. This makes the music sound, it must be said, like from a transistor radio in a dilapidated sewing workshop in a Cairo slum.

Nuances, which Concertgebouw visitors tend to crave, are gone. And the slumped mess of 21 men who sometimes seem to be more interested in the beautiful singer than in their score also falls far short of what we know as a symphony orchestra made up of artistic citizens.

But so you forget all that because of Amal Maher. For she shows where the power of Arabic music lies: three millennia of imprisonment in a rigid straitjacket of strict monophony and fixed divisions ensures that the artist seeks his freedom of expression in the only thing that is truly free: melody, 'coloratura' and the sensuous imagination.

In this, they have reached heights in Arabia that we in the West can only dream of. Somewhere near Valhalla.