Emirati composer on his latest work’s world debut
▶ The composer talks to Rob Garrett about his latest work, ‘Jabal Hafit,’ and a career of highs and lows
It’s a chilly night in New York City, the 36-hour-old snow yet to thaw in Central Park. Mohammed Fairouz puts down an icy drink and continues to talk, unravelling a giddying monologue of literary references, political opinions and personal sleights. This sounds a markedly conspicuous note in the dimly lit lobby that surrounds him.
The Emirati composer should probably be celebrating – this particular Manhattan hotel sits a few doors down from Carnegie Hall, where Fairouz’s latest composition received its world premiere less than an hour earlier – but something weighs heavy in the air, and on his mind. Besides, Fairouz has lost count of the number of times his work has been performed at the storied concert venue, the scene of scores of historic premieres – such as Antonín Dvorák’s landmark ninth symphony From
The New World, first performed by the New York Philharmonic back in 1893.
Premiered on April 3, Fairouz’s latest work strikes a somewhat humbler tone. Titled Piano
Miniature No 19, Jabal Hafit, the fidgety, solo piano piece was written barely a week earlier, atop the Al Ain mountain of that name. It is chillingly sparse, composed largely of single notes – either left eerily to ring out or struck staccato – and punctuated by gaping silences. A piece so simple it is hard to play, and harder still to listen to – it is easy to imagine wide open desert and rugged mountains as an inspiration.
“We were in Al Ain, we found a hotel up Jabal Hafit, this really wonderful kitschy hotel,” says Fairouz. “We went up and were waiting for our grilled seafood platter, and I decided to write something. It was the view – you know Al Ain is really quite amazing, especially after a few days in Dubai – at first, it’s like going up to a [different] country – but which country?
“You acclimatise. It’s like focusing a lens. There’s an internal logic to the piece, which you see in the natural environment in rock formations – this inner logic you want to capture.”
It might be the first time a piano piece has been written with direct reference to an Al Ain peak – and is surely the only time such a work has been performed at Carnegie Hall. At the time we talk, Fairouz has been back in his adopted home city of New York barely 24 hours, returning from his third visit to the UAE in six months. The son of an Emirati diplomat, Fairouz was raised between Dubai and global postings, before settling in the US “half his life” ago.
“It’s not about my roots, it’s not an identity – it’s something I am familiar with. I am not able to write about places I don’t know,” he says. “A lot of people write about everything – and there’s no way you know everything with that intimacy, the level of inquiry is lost.”
To the 32-year-old composer’s great regret, only a handful of his works have been performed in his hometown. The inaugural BBC Proms Dubai, at Dubai Opera in March 2017, marked the first time one of his major orchestral compositions was performed locally with the tone poem Pax
Universalis – a joyously uplifting, unashamedly sentimental plea for universal peace.
Yet Fairouz’s Emirati heritage has long been a source of inspiration. Hidden within second opera The New Prince,
Fairouz claims a symmetrical sixnote pattern represents the flow of traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road, while the National Anthem can be detected in the score. Yet, it seems, few people were listening.
“Because everybody gets it wrong,” he says. “There’s nobody who says ‘Emirati composer’– I’ve [been called] Syrian, Egyptian – I’m basically like [former US president Barack] Obama – I’ve been called Kenyan.”
All of which explains why he might choose to call the piece Jabal Hafit – seemingly a last-minute change from the advertised premiere of Bursts of
Meaning. The piece was presented at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall as part of a 10th anniversary concert by New York-based Mimesis Ensemble, a group that has had a strong relationship with Fairouz, programming his work regularly and recording his breakout debut opera Sumeida’s
Song, completed in 2008 when the composer was 22.
“Although Mohammed changed the title away from Bursts of
Meaning, I still hear that intention underneath the miniature,” said Katie Reimer, the 36-year-old American pianist who performed the work, and who also serves as the group’s founder, and artistic and executive director.
“There are little ‘bursts’ of sound, and the piece gives those bursts space to breathe and to be listened to. This miniature slows us down, asks us to stop and listen deeply and carefully.”
Framed in its final title as part of Fairouz’s Piano Miniature series,
Jabal Hafit joins a catalogue of fleeting yet profound reflections. Also performed by Reimer at Carnegie Hall was the haunting Piano Miniature No 11, For Syria,
dedicated to victims of the conflict, and the charged Piano
Miniature No 13, an elegy for Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was shot and killed in an altercation in Florida in 2012. Closing the programme, meanwhile, was the choral A
Prayer to the New Year, Fairouz’s stirring setting of a poem by the beloved Fadwa Tuqan – words he remembers reciting as a child.
This relatively modest performance comes little more than a year after the unveiling of The New Prince, a dizzying “geopolitical sci-fi opera” premiered by the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam that is arguably the most ambitious project of Fairouz’s career. Featuring a libretto by the American journalist and novelist David Ignatius, together the creative partners imagined a world where Renaissance-era political philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli is transported
500 years forward from the publication of his political tract
The Prince to 2032.
A frenetic triptych bringing to the stage real-life characters including Henry Kissinger, Osama bin Laden, Hillary Clinton, President Mohammed Morsi, Adolf Hitler and Chairman
Mao – and premiering weeks after Donald Trump’s ascension to the US presidency – The New Prince was one of the most headline courting premieres of the season. Yet, while production disputes and claimed edits to his work left Fairouz unhappy with the finished result, he pledges to realise his true intent in the future. “I think it’s disastrous the way it was done,” said Fairouz of the Dutch National’s The New Prince. “It was the worst thing anyone’s ever done to a work of mine – or of anything I’ve seen – and I’ve seen some real abominations.”
There are little ‘bursts’ of sound, and the piece gives those bursts space to breathe and to be listened to KATIE REIMER Pianist, Mimesis Ensemble