Fatma Said follows her award-winning debut album El Nour with a similarly imaginative and even more colourful release: Kaleidoscope.
Imbued with the spirit of the dance, Kaleidoscope spins across the floor and across cultures, genres and eras. The young Egyptian soprano takes the hand of such composers and songwriters as Johann Strauss, Franz Lehár, Jacques Offenbach, Charles Gounod, Kurt Weill, Carlos Gardel, Astor Piazzolla, Serge Gainsbourg, Gino Paoli, Frederick Loewe (half of the team who wrote My Fair Lady), and George Robert Merrill and Shannon Rubicam, who gave Whitney Houston a hit with ‘I Wanna Dance with Somebody’.
Among Fatma Said’s partners as she sings in French, German, English, Spanish, Italian and Arabic are the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo conducted by Sascha Goetzel, mezzo-soprano Marianne Crebassa (in the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann), trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary (in Irving Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’), and tango ensemble Quinteto Ángel.
If the album’s title and concept epitomise brilliance and joie de vivre, Fatma Said’s approach to the album is, characteristically, as thoughtful as it is creative.
“Why Kaleidoscope? A kaleidoscope is a device that refracts an image into a variety of shapes that keep changing for the viewer – yet the actual subject never changes, only the way it is analysed and reassembled.
“This album is a montage of many different songs and arias, each with its own story to tell through a particular style of music and rhythm. You will encounter my voice turning and changing kaleidoscopically as it inhabits these different characters and situations with shifting colours and varied themes inspired by dance.
“For me, music and dance interlink as one: they are emotion and physicality in unison – a single entity. It’s hard to imagine music without dance, or dance without music … Since I was very young, dancing has accompanied me everywhere, and I’ve learned a number of different styles: ballroom, Latin, Argentinian tango and more. I’ve always felt inspired by the physical and internal movement in dancing – whether with a partner or alone – and for me it represents another way of expressing myself.
“While researching potential repertoire for this album I found myself drawn to songs from a number of very different countries and peoples. Without limiting myself to classical operatic repertoire – I’ve never believed in boundaries between musical styles – I slowly began to imagine three dimensions of personal authenticity. Firstly, music and words with which I particularly identify … The second dimension is the way I respond and adapt vocally to each piece, not limiting my voice to one specific way of singing. The third dimension is dance.”
“As I assembled the programme I narrowed down my huge initial list of arias and songs to numbers I feel I can personally embody with my voice. In doing so I was finally able to perceive the striking range of these personas, from different parts of the world and different historical eras, and so very different from each other in their personalities, backgrounds and circumstances. Their music is infused with rhythm – in a great variety of dance types and styles – for very specific reasons. The specific music that the different personalities on this album sing and 'move’ with – whether in song, opera, operetta, zarzuela, musical theatre, tango, pop, jazz or swing – has inspired me to identify closely with each song.
“One of the challenges of this album has been to personify all these disparate characters in their varied contexts, giving them the diversity of voices and musical styles they need: multiple vocal colours, dance inflections, linguistic timbres. With each of them I could have danced – and sung – all night, forever turning our Kaleidoscope.”
