What wide awake eyes, what charm and what a beautiful soprano, dazzling in all registers and at the same time so slender, but also, with all due respect, what a wonderfully blue, shimmering dress: Fatma Said performed in the Prinzregententheater with the Munich Symphony Orchestra under Marcus Merkel a refreshingly cheerful, rarely melancholic evening in Spanish, Arabic, German and English with music between Orient and Occident, zarzuela and operetta, musical and opera.
When the young Egyptian opens her mouth, her heart and soul open. Then it doesn’t matter whether she embodies Gounod’s Julia, who is drunk with life and love, or the overjoyed Eliza, who wants to dance in the same oblivious way; whether she feels “Viennese blood” flowing in her or whether she has inherited it from a dancer’s mother, as she assures in Lehàr’s “My lips, they kiss so hot”. But she also literally gets stung by the tarantula to the exuberant sounds of Gerónimo Gimenéz.
Fatma Said then gets serious before “Ad Ay Sa’ab”, the Arabic version of Ángel Villoldo’s Argentine tango “El choclo”, and picks up the microphone. The young Egyptian, whose father was an influential liberal politician in her home country, dedicates the song to all women who have to fight for their rights, because “through will and dignity you can achieve anything!” Then she affirms, singing emphatically, representing all women in the world: “I’m ready for any argument!”
The fighter becomes visible behind the life-loving charm of a beautiful woman, and in Farid El Atrash’s “Ya Zahratan Fi Khayali” – again with bandoneon and now also a solo violin – one hears the touching, positive-sounding confession in Arabic: “I have I dedicated my life to my voice and my melodies and sang until my wounds healed.”
Under Marcus Merkel, the Munich Symphony Orchestra played a lot of charm and splendor, were wonderful co-creators, but also gave purely instrumental performances with the overture to “The Queen’s Lace Cloth”, the Lehàr waltz “Gold und Silber” or a whirling “Tarantella” by Respighi/ Rossini’s dazzling testimony to her love of music-making.
After each number there was enthusiastic applause, at the end even standing applause. And now you would like to see Fatma Said, who knows so much to tell with her voice and personality and who keeps opening up vistas into wide worlds, please also experience it on the opera stage in Munich.