Palestinian classical music talent to light up London event

Nay player Faris Ishaq and oud meastro Saied Silbak will premiere new compositions, arranged alongside St Paul's Sinfonia orchestra

Faris Ishaq brings a contemporary and experimental approach to playing the nay. Photo: Faris Ishaq

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Palestinian musicians touring the UK hope to celebrate their nation’s talent while shedding light on their country's embattled artistic institutions.

The UK charity PalMusic, which supports the Edward Said National Conservatory in Ramallah, a Palestinian city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is hosting its 10th anniversary concert at London’s Southwark Cathedral next week.

Three Palestinian musicians, global jazz flautist Faris Ishaq, oud player Saied Silbak and concert pianist Marc Kawwas will play alongside St Paul’s Sinfonia, a London-based orchestra. The arrangements will be conducted by British-Lebanese concert flautist Wissam Boustany.

The concert aims to change dominant perceptions of Palestine as war rages in Gaza and the West Bank. “People need to experience an alternative to perpetual war and destruction of life,” said Boustany.

The concert aimed at showcasing “advanced Palestinian talent” is also in support of the Conservatory, which has kept up its activities in Gaza against all odds and has branches in Ramallah, Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

"We would like the whole cathedral to celebrate Palestine, Palestine’s tenacity and its cultural vibrancy,” said PalMusic's chairwoman Caroline Montagu, Countess of Sandwich. "We will continue to fund Palestinian children and young people, and hope this concert, the cathedral and our audience will strongly support this."

Faris Ishaq, who lives in Bethlehem, brings a contemporary and experimental approach to the nay, a flute made of cane reed with ancient roots in Palestine and the Levant.

Formally trained as a classical and jazz trombonist, Ishaq has adapted the nay to create a more contemporary sound. But he also draws on native music traditions, such as the tashbib, commonly used by the region’s nomadic shepherds. “It's a celebration of our culture, our root, our connection to land,” he told The National.

Ishaq will play two new pieces for the first time in the UK this month. Wildscape will be performed alongside the St Paul’s Sinfonia at Southwark Cathedral, as part of PalMusic’s 10th anniversary concert. He will then play Kham at the London Jazz Festival the following week.

The nay, he explains, is often thought to have a melancholic sound. The Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran wrote of the nay’s music as a song that “lives on, after the universe is extinguished”.

But “rhythmic, percussive” genres such as tashbib – which means to become young and is often played at weddings, reveal a different side to the instrument. “The nay is sometimes called a 'shababa' or youth,” he said.

Ishaq taught himself to play the nay in his late teens, having learnt classical music and the trombone at Edward Said National Conservatory of Music in Bethlehem.

Over years of experimentation, Ishaq has learnt to play the instrument to achieve the wider range of notes required in jazz and modern Arabic music.

The first step, he said, was to take the nay to a specialist craftsman in Egypt to add two more holes to the instrument. The second, which he refined as a jazz student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, the US, was to manipulate the way he plays to create new notes. The experience, he explains, involves his whole body.

“I do different shapes with my head, with my body, with my breath. You can actually change up to almost half a tone and one tone with your breath,” he said.

The performance of Wildscapes will mark the first time Ishaq has arranged one of his own pieces for an orchestra. It will also be the first time the St Paul’s Sinfonia has been accompanied by a nay. One of the challenges, he said, will be to make sure the mellow sound of the nay is not drowned out by the orchestra.

Ishaq rejects the notion he is “preserving” tashbib as a dying musical genre. Preserving, he explains, has orientalist undertones and is an acknowledgement that your culture itself is dying, too.

“I don't want to preserve,” he said. "It's like saying that I'm going to die, and my father is dead and my culture is dead. It’s more that I’m bringing it to life, to celebrate it, to show it."

Rather, he hopes to show the “visionary” culture of Palestinian artists like himself, who can experiment with tradition while also creating music of international quality. “I want people to have an authentic Palestinian experience, but also a visionary Palestinian experience,” he said.

“We are rooted in our heritage but we are also visionaries who want to celebrate our culture and we can compete on a very high level internationally and break the stigma for good,” he said.

London-based oud player Saied Silbak will unveil three new songs, including a lullaby entitled Yella Bye, which he wrote for his four-year-old niece living in Northern Galilee near Israel’s border with Lebanon.

The song was written before October 7 last year, the day that Hamas attacks sparked the Israel-Gaza war, but a new reality has set in for his niece since, as Israel's war with the Lebanese-militia Hezbollah has caused hundreds of thousands of people along the border to seek refuge in shelters.

“They’ve been struggling a lot,” he said. "They have to run to shelters, my sister is scared to send her daughter to kindergarten. My niece talks about it all the time, it creeps into your life. It’s devastating, we can’t do anything from here."

Silbak said it was important for the concert to go ahead despite “all the difficulties of playing and performing music” in such “horrendous times and ongoing genocide” in Gaza. “I don’t think music loses meaning,” he insisted.

Instead, he hopes the concert will highlight the diversity of Palestinian talent, with “three musicians who are so different at their core”, he said. “It shows a very wide spectrum, the diversity of Palestine, Palestinians artists and musicians," he added.

“It shows our potential. Had we not had the occupation or been living under these circumstances, we could have grown into something different."

A graduate of the Guildhall Music School, he released a solo album The Small Things last year and recently published an ongoing collaboration with British-Jewish singer Ana Salvero, in which the pair explore common ground in Arabic and Spanish Sephardic music.

Pianist Marc Kawwas will play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto N3 with the Sinfonia. Originally from the West Bank, Kawwas, 17, has spent the past four years at Chetham's, a specialist music school in Manchester, as a PalMusic scholar.

Kawwas is driven by the performance and loves the sound of the piano when part of an orchestra. “I’m always thinking about orchestral sounds, always thinking of all the instruments combined in one,” he told The National.

The collaboration with St Paul’s Sinfonia, he said, was an opportunity to “create something grand”.

Kawwas said he’d been overwhelmed by feelings of “helplessness” this past year, watching the war unfold in Gaza and the West Bank. “My heart is always with everyone back there, with the people in the West Bank and even more so those in Gaza,” he said.

“The most unfortunate thing for me is not being able to be there to do anything to support the people who are in most need of help."

As his schooling at Chetham’s comes to an end, he hopes he can stay in the UK for university. He doesn’t know when he will next return to the Palestinian territories. “All I can hope and pray for is that things do get easier,” he said.

The greatest advantage of being at Chetham's, he said, has been his encounters with master pianists, who regularly tour the UK. A highlight was meeting British pianist Peter Donohoe, a Chetham's alumnus, and pianists from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Russia.

“There are always people coming and going from all sorts of backgrounds, with things to teach and knowledge to give to people,” Kawwas said.

Kawwas admires the Romantic and Late Romantic composers, particularly those such as Johannes Brahms, who wrote for the piano with a “majestic orchestral sound” in mind.

But he is also drawn to those who “thought just about the piano”, like Chopin and Rachmaninoff. “They kept pushing the boundaries and limits of the instrument,” he said.

Beethoven’s contributions to developing modern piano music were “crucial”, Kawwas said. “He always wanted more noise, more volume, more range in colour, more resonance. He was always seeking that and it's apparent to me in the way he writes his music."

But there is no single piece of music that has changed his outlook – rather he builds relationships with every work he learns to play.

“Everything I listen to, everything I play, every time perform, every time I actively analyse the music, I get a little bit better. I learn a bit more about music, about the world, about the composer and about myself,” he said.

“The only thing that can be done is to keep going, to make sure that an event like this one does go forward, because is utterly essential for the current situation."