‘I wish she could have died soundlessly,” says Wahab, the 19-year-old at the heart of Oum – A Son’s Quest for His Mother. As he struggles to reach the hospital where his mother lies dying, he is angry and afraid, tormented by memories of their changing relationship. He recalls the moment the phone rang with the command to hurry to her bedside, the moment he witnessed a fatal attack during the conflict that drove them from their home, the moment he ceased to recognise his mother’s face, calling her only “the woman with the blond hair”, such – we gather – was the traumatic impact of exile on them both.
Wahab’s reminiscences loop, falter, intertwine. The resulting spoken monologue, adapted by Wout van Tongeren from a novel by Lebanese-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, runs almost continuously through the work. In Oum’s UK premiere, it was a tour-de-force delivered by Dutch actor Nadia Amin, who conjured the unthinkable on the nearly empty stage of Barbican Hall as she ran and froze, stamped and cowered.
But the narrative is also haunted by music. There is no chance that Wahab’s mother (his “oum”, in Arabic) will die soundlessly. Within Bushra El-Turk’s score – part opera, part soundtrack, part commentary on the unfolding story – the work’s fleeting silences are shocking in their intensity. Amin was amplified but still periodically swamped by the waves of delicate trills and tremolo, long curling lines of unison melody and brief, catastrophic dissonances of the music.
Born in Britain to Lebanese parents, El-Turk often stages dialogues and tensions between different musical languages. Oum is scored for the culturally hybrid forces of the Amsterdam Andalusian Orchestra, whose players (strings, percussion, flutes and accordion plus the oud and qanun of traditional Arabic music) switched between ornamental filigree and searing lyricism, the accordion providing single, ethereal sustained notes and harsh cluster chords in alternation. A trio of singers, sliding virtuosically between Middle Eastern and European operatic idioms, echoed some of Wahib’s English phrases but otherwise sang in richly melismatic Arabic. Towards the end, the trio’s smoky, velvet-voiced contralto Ghalia Benali performed the song that underpins El-Turk’s score: “Al Atlal” (The Ruins), one of the signature numbers of mid-century Egyptian superstar singer and Arab national treasure Umm Kulthum. While many in the audience hummed and clapped, Japanese conductor Kanako Abe, who had energetically coordinated passages of improvisation and intricate scoring alike, put down her baton to nod along, smiling in appreciation.
