Syrian singer Sabah Fakhri has recently performed the Spring Feast concert at the Egyptian Opera House. The Egyptian audience has great affection to the Syrian singer for his Tawashih, Qudood Halibiyyeh, Mawaweel, Folksongs and the songs of Qasabji and Zakaria Ahmed.
“I perform all singing types which address all age groups. For me a poem is number one as I consider it the backbone. Muwashah comes next and depends on beautiful poetry and compounded rhythms while al Door comes third and needs a strong throat and popular words. The last one is Kudood Halabiyyah,” Fakhri told the Arabic daily al Hayat.
Fakhri believes that “we have an Arab and a beautiful eastern music. Are our instruments incapable of performance? Of course not. Why is westernization then? Development is something but westernization is something else. Development should be within the framework of our instruments in order to be consistent with our time and the same time we should keep the lute and violin,” said Fakhri.
When Fakhri was head of musician association, he issued a resolution to add the lute to all troupes in order to save the instrument from extinction. “Substituting the lute by the Korg was easy and that’s why I decided that,” added Fakhri.
Responding to a question on whose voices is Sabah Fakhri gleeful he said, “I am gleeful with all those voices, which my ears grew up on starting with Abu al Ela Mohammed, Sheikh Salameh Hijazi, and prominent singers such as Umm Kulthoom and Mohammed Abdel Wahhab. This is n addition to the Cedars Nightingale Saber al Safh and Wadie’ al Safi. The new voices, according to him, are not attractive except for a sentence you hear it once or many times at the most.”
For Fkhri, Video Clips are “commercial phenomena that may be useful. In the past there were the filmed songs but photography was used to serve the song. The video Clip distracts the attention of the audience from the song and so it has become a bad commodity.” – Albawaba.com
