{"id":6309,"date":"2024-08-30T16:19:10","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T21:19:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/?p=6309"},"modified":"2024-08-30T16:19:10","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T21:19:10","slug":"al-hakawati-premiered-at-2024-cabrillo-festival-of-contemporary-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/?p=6309","title":{"rendered":"Al Hakawati Premiered at 2024 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

Al Hakawati,<\/i> a new work for soprano and orchestra received its premiere<\/a> on August 2nd in Santa Cruz, CA at the 2024 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, with soprano Miriam Khalil and conductor Cristian M\u04d1celaru. The work will be repeated on September 21 by the WDR Sinfonieorchester K\u00f6ln in Germany. The work is a co-commission of Cabrillo, WDR and l’Orchestre National de France (who will do the work in 2026).<\/p>\n

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Miriam Khalil and Cristian M\u04d1celaru in rehearsal; photo credit: RRJones<\/p><\/div>Al Hakawati<\/i> (The Storyteller) presents fragments from an opera-in-progress entitled The Book of Tales<\/i>. The opera is inspired by a recent discovery about a beloved story collection, the so-called \u201cArabian Nights.\u201d The exact provenance of these medieval Arabic tales, properly known as Alf Laylah wa-Laylah<\/i> [One Thousand and One Nights], has always been something of a mystery. That all changed in 1993 when a forgotten 18th century Arabic manuscript was found in the Vatican library. It was a travel memoir written by a 75-year-old Syrian storyteller named Hanna Diyab. In 1707, the young Diyab had embarked on an extraordinary, years-long journey to Europe. His incredible adventures culminated in a meeting with the Sun King, King Louis XIV, in the halls of Versailles. Diyab told his entrancing stories to everyone he met in his travels, including to Antoine Galland, a translator and archaeologist in Paris. It was Galland who, in 1710, first introduced Western readers to the stories of Ali Baba and Aladdin in Les Mille et une Nuits<\/i>\u2014though Galland makes no mention of the storyteller. Diyab returned to Syria in 1709 and eventually became a successful cloth merchant in Aleppo.

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photo credit: RRJones<\/p><\/div> <\/p>\n

He seems to have had no idea how far his captivating stories had travelled.
\nThe opera connects stories and storytellers across time and place: from the present day, to the Ancien R\u00e9gime of France, to the imaginary world of Scheherazade. And, though the \u201cframe story\u201d is Diyab\u2019s, the most significant characters in the story are women. The fragments in Al Hakawati<\/i> comprise four \u201cscenes\u201d that feature the opera\u2019s three principal female characters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Al Hakawati, a new work for soprano and orchestra received its premiere on August 2nd in Santa Cruz, CA at the 2024 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, with soprano Miriam Khalil and conductor Cristian M\u04d1celaru. The work will be repeated on September 21 by the WDR Sinfonieorchester K\u00f6ln in Germany. The work is a co-commission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-events","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6309"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6319,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6309\/revisions\/6319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alzand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}