FatmaSaid

Press

• Through The Noise

  Lafayette, London

  Sep 2023

  • ‘This concert is going to have a lot of French music and also French film music, which I especially love’. One of the most highly internationally acclaimed young concert and opera artists of our time gives us a clue about her programme for an upcoming event on 17 September – but Egyptian soprano Fatma Said will not be performing it in a concert hall. She will be appearing at the Lafayette auditorium in London’s Kings Cross which bills its entertainments as ‘Live music, street food and drinks – all under one roof’. It will be her second appearance at one of the groundbreaking events organised by through the noise – the radical brainchild of co-founders and directors Jack Bazalgette and Jack Crozier in which greatly in-demand young classical artists come to crowd-funded venues and clubs to perform as part of evenings that also include sets of jazz, afro-beat and funk. The virtuoso Fatma Said triumphed with the audience for her first through the noise event at the Oslo Hackney earlier this year, singing music she had recorded last year for her enormously successful Warner Classics album Kaleidoscope. For Fatma Said this has been a profoundly rewarding discovery that reverberates with her strongly-felt ideals. She had already been highly extolled in an eclectic range of musical genres, and yet, as she explains, the invitation from through the noise was something appealingly new. ‘They told me, “Just do what you want.” Now nowhere else says that to me! That I could be 100% free in what I wanted to say was the first attraction when I was offered this possibility. But then what surprised me and what I didn’t see coming was the whole setting and the wonderful interaction with the audience. First of all, there are no chairs – everyone is standing all the time – so the atmosphere is like it is at a pop concert where the audience always stands informally, and I love that. I would say the average age group is between around 18 and 40, and these are not people who go to opera houses and concert halls, so the fact that I could perform in front of them meant a lot to me. For classical music’s future I think it is really important that an initiative like through the noise should take place more and more because it gives the opportunity for the artist to go to the places where young people are – and that is how we can nurture this generation’s love of classical music. If we don’t reach out to them, they will have zero interest in coming to our concerts – but if we go to them in their places instead of trying to devise ways of bringing them to our concerts, then they are going to become our new audience later on.

    • Classical Music
    • 21 August 2023