The UAE National Orchestra returned to the stage on Thursday with a concert underscoring its purpose.
Taking place at Cultural Foundation Abu Dhabi, the performance revisited 50 years of Emirati film and television music, drawing on everything from theme songs to advertising jingles. The show, titled From Screen to Stage, featured productions including Ishhafan, Hayer Tayer, Khalil Fi Mahab Al Reeh, Freej, Khiyanat Watan and Al Kameen, as well as a short piece from a Majid magazine television advertisement.
Together, they told a story of a national film and television industry that tracked the country’s growth and ambition while remaining rooted in local cultural traditions.
It was another occasion for the orchestra to flex its range. It made its debut in January with The Beginning, an ambitious work commissioned by Nadim Tarabay, followed by Faces of Love, which drew on the poetry of Rumi, and another programme that reworked pieces by Vivaldi on Middle Eastern instruments.
All were impressive, but From Screen to Stage felt especially well-matched to the ensemble’s role.
Performed by orchestra and choir, with clips from the original productions projected behind them, the concert unfolded in four suites arranged musically, with scores seeping into one another to create a flow that felt less like a medley than a sonic history.
That structure also revealed how Emirati screen music has developed, rather than simply presenting a parade of recognisable themes.
What emerged most clearly was the role of landscape in Emirati storytelling. In works such as the TV series Al Boom, the sea suggested promise and connection to other cultures.
In the comedy Tawash, it carried distance and separation in a story set in a local neighbourhood and shaped by the need to make do with limited resources.
Just as striking was how the music has changed over time. The earliest productions, including 1978’s Al Ghos and Ishhafan, are credited to unknown composers, but remain firmly rooted in Emirati folk tradition, with wordless choral refrains and sea chanty melodies.
By the 1980s, Emirati composers were coming more fully into view, bringing with them a more legible compositional tradition.
Eid Al Faraj, who scored a number of television productions from 1998, created some of the evening’s most stirring moments. His music for Aber Sabeel was brooding and expansive, using strings and nay to evoke the mystery of desert life.
His score for the comedy Hayer Tayer was something else entirely: bouncy, rhythmic and almost polyphonic in the exchange between male and female voices in the choir, capturing the social energy of a show rooted in community life.
Ebrahim Juma, another significant and perhaps under-recognised figure in Emirati television composition, brought a different texture to Reeh Al Shamal. The nay returned, alongside vocal refrains that almost matched the swaying desert winds of the opening sequence shown on screen.
As Emirati film and TV grew in ambition, it also opened to collaboration. Khorfakkan, the 2020 historical drama tracing some of Sharjah’s origins, brought composer Michael Fleming together with Osama Ali.
The score was grand and sweeping, perhaps the evening’s most Hollywood-inflected, matching the film’s swashbuckling account of the defeat of Portuguese invaders at the hands of the emirate’s forebears.
The range on display was considerable, also taking in Emirati animated series such as Freej and Shaabiyat Al Cartoon, yet running through the programme were the same recurring ideas: community, solidarity, family and openness to other cultures.
“For many in the UAE, television and film have been part of everyday life for years. The music from those productions is closely tied to how people remember certain moments, stories and even periods of their lives,” general manager Sheikha Alia bint Khalid Al Qassimi told The National ahead of the show.
“It is also a way of recognising the composers behind these works and how their contribution has shaped how these stories were felt across generations.”
That ambition is closely tied to one of the orchestra’s core aims: to build a national library of commissioned and arranged works, recording them for future generations.
Sheikha Alia said From Screen to Stage will be part of an ongoing effort by the orchestra to preserve Emirati music that might otherwise remain scattered across ageing recordings, half-remembered broadcasts and private nostalgia.
“What this performance signals is simple: that we are coming back, and that we are doing so in a way that is thoughtful and connected to the moment,” she added.
“More broadly, it reflects the role we are growing into as an orchestra: to create moments that bring people together, and to contribute to the cultural life of the country in a way that feels meaningful, especially at times when that connection is needed most.”
