Music of the Oud overview: Baroque twists of Arabic scales

by Marie Rodriguez

Joseph Tawadros gave an equally jokey and insightful musicological lesson. At the same time, he and his percussionist brother, James, rejoined the Sydney Symphony Orchestra after the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony in G minor (K183). After his oud and James’s req (small tambourine) duetted on a short excerpt, Tawadros determined that, with the harmonies removed, the melodic and rhythmic cloth became not so exclusive to the Arabic tune.

Music of the Oud overview: Baroque twists of Arabic scales 3

Tawadros astutely chose Mozart to complete a software that includes his very own compositions, highlighting the differences and overlaps among the harmony-wealthy Western classical subculture (this being a piece wherein the 17-yr-antique Mozart extensively used unison passages) and the linear (melody and rhythm) method that finds such potent expression in Indian and Arabic tune. The centerpiece changed into Tawadros’s 2017 Concerto for Oud and Orchestra (the SSO below the active path of Benjamin Northey), wherein orchestrator Jessica.

Wells allowed Tawadros’s present for placing melodies to glisten, frequently fattening the sinuous strains with unisons instead of weighting them with Concord. A work of high drama and contrast became, in phrases of each composition and execution, a massive step forward on Tawadros’s advanced tries at orchestral settings for oud. This is an instrument of lace-like delicacy, so the work, like pre-forte keyboard concertos, had to offer enough solo area, even though the oud and req (which could arguably percentage the concerto’s name) had been expertly amplified.

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