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Cairo Contemporary Music Days 2012

Cairo Contemporary Music Days 2012

Almost a year has passed since the successful first edition of the Cairo Contemporary Music Days, and we are very pleased to announce that the second Cairo Days will take place from May 19 to 25! This year's edition will be dedicated to FRANCE, our Mediterranean Guest Country 2012/13. Under the auspices of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture, we will again present concerts by musicians and ensembles that specialize on contemporary music, this time from the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and of course France. Furthermore, we will for the very first time witness performances of the Egyptian Contemporary Music Ensemble (ECME) at an Egyptian festival, including five new pieces by Egyptian composers conducted by

Mohammad Saad Basha, John Baboukis, and Thierry Pécou.

As last year, the festival program includes seminars, workshops, and round table discussions with our guests from France and other European countries, free of charge and open to the public. The EECMS will continue and intensify its cooperation with national and international educational institutions. It is currently coordinating projects with the Cairo Conservatoire and the Department of Performing and Visual Arts of the American Universiy in Cairo as well as with acclaimed Egyptian composers, journalists and musicologists.

We are proud to say that our collaboration projects in the course of our Mediterranean Guest Country initiative do not end in Cairo. In 2012/13, the ECME will perform in France on several occasions, and we are very much looking forward to a huge Egyptian/Mediterranean composers presentation in collaboration with Radio France at Festival Présences 2013 in Provence, the European Capital of Culture 2013. Three brand new Egyptian pieces will be presented among other very exciting material in the course of this intercultural programme - the commission winners will be unveiled at the end of this newsletter.
More details about our projects in France will be announced very shortly!

Cairo Contemporary Music Days 2012
May 19-25

Our society is very happy to have won the Cairo Opera House for the Cairo Contemporary Music Days and a number of other projects. We will present three concerts in cooperation with the Cairo Opera House in 2012 alone, and would like to thank Dr. Ines Abdel Dayem, the newly-appointed Director of the Opera House, for showing such great appreciation of our efforts over the last years to shape a completely new branch of cultural activities in Egypt. We will keep you posted about our upcoming cooperation projects with this prestigious institution.

Beside the Opera House, we have been able to involve some other highly popular venues in Cairo for our festival: El Sawy Culturewheel, Prince Taz Palace, Cairo Creative Centr and Malak Gabr will also be hosting concerts in the course of the Cairo Days.

In addition to our national supporters, we are indebted to many international institutions such as the Institut Français, the City of Strasbourg, Music Center the Netherlands, Pro Helvetia, and Music:LX - Luxembourg Export Office for making this prestigious event possible.

Ensemble Linéa, France

Saturday, May 19^th, 2012, Cairo Opera House, 8pm

Sunday, May 20^th, 2012, Alexandria Opera House, 8pm

Ensemble Linea will present a French contemporary music portrait on May 19th at the Cairo Opera House. The same programme will also be presented at the Alexandria Opera House.

Beyond any schools and trends, the artistic project of Linea covers quite diverse aesthetic perspectives - from musical theatre to electronic music, from Western music to the rich Asian repertoires. Based in Alsace (eastern France, bordering on Germany and Switzerland), at the crossroads of several cultures, Linea naturally approaches the repertoires in their multicultural dimension. Linea advocates an engaged music which is anchored in modernity: it favours works which question the mutations and complexities of our era.

Programme:
Pierre Boulez: Dérive (1984)
Gérard Pesson: Ne pas oublier coq rouge dans jour craquelé (2010)
Nahla Mattar: Three (2008)
Philippe Hurel: Step (2007)
Gérard Grisey: Talea (1986)

ON 25 concert and CD production

The EECMS is looking forward to create what is not only the first ECME recording, but very probably also the first contemporary music CD with an exclusively Egyptian content! This spring, we are going to produce a life concert recording of our ON 25 Egyptian composers concert in cooperation with the Institute for Music Technology at the American University in Cairo. Most of these pieces were created for the Cairo Contemporary Music Days and/or dedicated to the ECME. Beside Ahmed Madkour's "White Shroud" (2011) that was premiered at last year's Cairo Days by Ensemble BCN 216 from Barcelona and conductor José María Sánchez-Verdú and has already celebrated two performances in Europe (Barcelona, Spain, and Augsburg, Germany), and Amr Okba's "Integration" (2010), the works that will be included have been completed only this year. It will be a very special honour to present the Egyptian premiere of Wael Sami El Kholy's "Crescendo II" (2012), a piece for 2 violins, 2 cellos, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, and horn, as a collaboration between members of the ECME and Ensemble Linea!

Programme:
Ahmed Madkour: White Shroud (2011) - commissioned by BCN 216
Mohamed Saad Basha: Lament Song (2012)
Ramz Sabry Samy: Copticum (2012)
Amr Okba: Integration (2010)
Wael Sami El Kholy: Crescendo II (2012)