Words adapted from ‘A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky’ (or ‘Death by Stabs of Sorrow’) by Ali Safar (translated by Anne-Marie McManus) as published by Saqi Books in Syria Speaks. Commissioned for the Sacconi Quartet and Mark Padmore by the Friends of the Sacconi Quartet, the Micahel Cuddigan Trust and the Vernon Ellis Foundation.

  • T + str4tet
  • Tenor
  • 30 min
  • Ali Safar and Anne-Marie McManus
  • English

Programme Note

I have only visited Damascus once, twenty years ago, on the way to Palmyra.  I had a purpose (I was writing music for a play about Palmyra’s Queen Zenobia) but essentially I was a tourist.  Like any visitor, I was thrilled to step out of the noisy modern city into the magical ancient world of the walled Old City, its vibrant souk leading to the magnificent mosque, and a labyrinth of winding, narrow streets filled with the smell of unleavened bread.

In Palmyra, I was met with extraordinary kindness everywhere.  On one occasion, a little Bedouin boy noticed that I was risking sunstroke wandering bare-headed among the spectacular ruins: he showed me how to tie a turban, then took me to have tea with his family in their tent.

Since then, I have watched helplessly as these places of wonder have been devastated and their inhabitants scattered and killed.  When the Sacconi Quartet suggested that I might choose a Syrian poet for our collaboration, I welcomed the idea. 

I searched for a long time to find a contemporary poet whose work might gain from any music I could imagine.  I felt it was important to find first-hand accounts of the Syrian experience – but, of course, I was always reading them in translation.  In an anthology called Syria Speaks, I was astonished to read something that looked like prose, but was full of poetry.  It was Anne-Marie McManus’s fine translation of Ali Safar’s ‘A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky’ – an eloquent, thoughtful, contained yet vivid account of life in a war-torn country, all the more moving for its restraint.

In setting these words, I have not attempted to imitate Syrian music.  However, there is what might be called a linguistic accommodation in my choice of scale, or mode.  Several movements are in a mode that I first discovered while writing a cantata commemorating the First World War: it has a tuning that I associate with war, its violence and desolation.  This eight-note mode is similar to scales found in Syrian music.  I did not choose it in the abstract: it emerged from the harmonies I was exploring in the earlier work, and emerged again as I was looking for the right musical colours to set Ali Safar’s words.  In this work, its Arabic aspect is more prominent.

Jonathan Dove

 

Ali Safar’s biography in Syria Speaks:

Ali Safar is a Syrian poet and filmmaker working in media and journalism.  Several collections of his poetry have been published in Arabic, including Eloquence of Place (1994), Silent (1999), Hunting the Stray Sentence (2000) and City Child (2012).  In 2004, his anthology Syria: Continent of Poets was published.

 

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Reviews

A terrible tragedy, beautifully expressed

Kings Place, London
The Sacconi Quartet played Jonathan Dove's new setting of words by the Syrian poet Ali Safar – a profound example of music's capacity to turn pain into art

Jonathan Dove's new work, which received its first London performance at this 15th anniversary concert by the Sacconi Quartet, is an unusual and timely one. Scored for tenor and string quartet, it sets English translations by Anne-Marie McManus of text from the Syrian poet Ali Safar's A Black Cloud in a Leaden White Sky, or Death by Stabs of Sorrow.

Safar and McManus have distilled elements of the tragic Syrian experience into words that are simple, direct and without any hint of rhetoric or sensation. Dove has succeeded in setting them to music that allows their plainness and understatement to register to maximum effect while maintaining a striking character of its own.

The string writing moves back and forth between painful intensity and frozen introspection, with many subtle shades in between. The tenor line – here presented by Mark Padmore with immaculate artistry, and a technique so finely honed that one scarcely noticed it – amplifies the eloquent candour of the originals.

The overall impact of the work and its performance was profound, an unforgettable example of the power of art to convey something terrible throuth an expression that is paradoxically in itself beautiful.

Dove's piece took up the entire second half. The Sacconis led up to it with an account of Mozart's Hoffmeister Quartet in which their fine balance and near flawless ensemble provided the bedrock for a graceful yet rhythmically vital interpetation; and a performance of Mendelssohn's great F minor Quartet whose fury and ferocity set the scene for what was to come.

George Hall, The Guardian
14th July 2016

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