Palestinian-Israeli pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar grew up in Nazareth. For an Arab child in an Arab city, piano lessons were not just unusual, they were unheard of, so why was he obsessed with the instrument, asks ARMINTA WALLACE
IT WOULD BE easy to introduce the Palestinian-Israeli pianist Saleem Abboud Ashkar by reciting the usual litany of the classical artist. He “made his debut at Carnegie Hall at the age of 22”; “has worked with some of the world’s most renowned conductors”; “released a recital CD of Brahms, Mozart and Schubert on the EMI label in 2005”. But Abboud Ashkar, who’s coming to Dublin to play at the National Concert Hall with the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra, introduces himself in a rather more unusual way.
“I grew up in the old town of Nazareth,” he says. “With its narrow streets and its bazaar – all the oriental cliches, in fact. The mosque. The call to prayer. This is what my auditory environment was. And in the middle of it I was sitting there practising Haydn.”
For an Arab child in an Arab city – even one whose father was an engineer and his mother a schoolteacher – piano lessons weren’t just unusual. They were unheard of. “The reason we even had a piano at home,” he explains, “was that my father was trying to sell his old car. He had a Russian colleague who was an engineer and needed a car – so my father exchanged his car for a piano. My father didn’t play. My mother didn’t play. Nobody played. It was just a nice thing to have, basically.”
When Abboud Ashkar was six years old, a distant uncle arrived in Nazareth from Lebanon in search of his relatives. “He had been educated in Europe, and he played a little bit. That was my first contact with somebody playing the piano. He stayed with us for three or four weeks, and by the time he disappeared I was already infected with the virus. From very early on I wanted to be a pianist rather than just wanting to play the piano. I was very clear about that – although it remains for me mysterious, why that happened.” His journey of discovery certainly inverted all the usual cliches, in which determined parents drag their reluctant offspring to music lessons. “Instead,” Abboud Ashkar says with a chuckle, “I kind of dragged my family along with me. I was absolutely obsessed. But my parents were open enough to try to support me – because it became very obvious that in my case, discovering music meant also crossing the boundaries of my society. I had to get out of Nazareth. There were no pianists, no opera, nobody to play with. I was completely isolated; a crazy little boy playing the piano for six or seven hours a day on my own in a city that had nothing to do with this music.”
His parents decided that the answer might be to study abroad, so he went to Paris and London for lessons. At the age of 13 he went to live in London to attend a music school, but stayed just six months before loneliness and homesickness drove him back to the Middle East. Finally it became obvious that his only remaining option was to learn Hebrew and study in Jewish music schools in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
Clearly this was a choice fraught with emotional – and, indeed, physical – danger. When I ask what his teenage friends made of his decision, he is uncharacteristically silent for a moment. “Ah,” he eventually answers. “I’d like not to think of that too much. It was never too terrible – but also not too easy. Mmmmm. It’s . . . I had to, later on, deal with all these issues. Especially this idea that becoming a musician should not be something which detached me from my own sense of belonging, or sacrifice my sense of connection to my country and my people.”
Abboud Ashkar has some interesting observations to make about the psyche of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, whose first piano concerto he will perform at the NCH. Mendelssohn grew up in Berlin, where his Jewish father – concerned at the anti-Semitism rampant in the city in the early 19th century – converted the family to Protestantism, changing their surname to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy.
“There must have been some questions about his adopted identity floating around inside of Mendelssohn,” says Abboud Ashkar. “His grandfather was a leading Jewish philosopher who addressed the topic of modern Jewish identity and integration and all that. So it can’t be that he didn’t care about it. It cannot be. But what is for me enigmatic about Mendelssohn is that he never expressed this conflict in words – as, for instance, Heine did. I know Heine was a writer and poet so it was more his job, but still – Mendelssohn was a highly educated person. Yet not even in his private correspondence is there much evidence that he struggled with this.” Abboud Ashkar believes the composer somehow processed the matter through his music. “This is very speculative,” he says, “but I think that part of his obsessive continuous writing of Lutheran music hymns and chorales and little motets – he was constantly writing sacred music, big and small – must have been a kind of continuous reaffirmation of his adopted identity. I don’t want to use the word “therapeutic. It’s too modern. But it must have been something that was for him healing or reaffirming.”
However valid it may be, this perspective on Mendelssohn should – Abboud Ashkar insists – have no bearing on our interpretation of his music. “Artistically his works are on the highest level – without having changed the course of music. They were not revolutionary. The accent was not on the innovative. And yet he definitely had his own voice. What I gather from his letters was that he thought it was too easy to break with tradition. He thought of what Berlioz did as an easy way out – to take a huge orchestra, and make so much noise, was for him absolutely meaningless.” One way or another, he adds, the piano concerto is an unqualified treat. “It’s gorgeous. It was created at a time when Mendelssohn was obsessing about church music. He goes to Vienna. He goes to Rome, Paris, Munich – and all the time he’s sitting in libraries finding old scores and being inspired to write his own sacred music. And in the middle of this research he writes this concerto which is the most champagne music possible – especially the third movement. You have to ask why what happened.
“I looked into it, and – of course – it’s a woman.” In Munich, Mendelssohn met a beautiful young woman who was also a pianist. “The third movement is an absolute flirt. On the other hand, if you look at the second movement it’s clearly a chorale.
"So the concerto has all these qualities – the champagne Mendelssohn, the Midsummer Night's DreamMendelssohn, but also the most noble music possible. We tend to see him as one-dimensional. But he is not at all." Given Abboud Ashkar's own background, it's not surprising he is interested in Mendelssohn's cross-cultural make-up. Nor should it surprise anyone – though, the world being as it is, it probably will – that as a young Palestinian musician trying to make a career in Israel, he got his first big breaks from Israeli colleagues. At the age of 17 he was chosen by the conductor Zubin Mehta to play a concerto with the Israel Philharmonic. Since then Mehta – who was awarded the Israel Prize in recognition of his lifelong devotion to the state of Israel – has been very supportive of Abboud Ashkar, as has another international superstar, Daniel Barenboim. Abboud Ashkar spent some time as part of Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, established in 1999 to encourage musicians from Egypt, Iran, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria to leave aside their cultural and religious differences and perform together. He is quick to pay tribute to both Mehta and Barenboim, describing the latter as "a real musical giant".
These days he finds himself in the company of another musical giant in the shape of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. One of the oldest orchestras in the world, it was conducted for more than a decade by Mendelssohn himself. “I actually try not to think about that too much,” he says. “It’s the same institution which he led and where he performed with Liszt and Clara Schumann. It’s the same institution that has been going on all these years. There’s something about it which is inspiring – but one becomes in awe of it, also.”
There will almost certainly no sign of any awe when Abboud Ashkar launches into the Mendelssohn piano concerto and Mussorgsky’s flamboyant Pictures at an Exhibition under the baton of Riccardo Chailly. The tour will take him to Frankfurt and Lucerne as well as Dublin and the BBC Proms in London. But wherever he plays, for Abboud Ashkar Palestine is still, and always will be, home. He performs there on a regular basis and is involved with a music school in Nazareth, where his brother is a teacher.
“It’s very important to me to be able to play for Palestinians,” he says. “To be heard and to be understood. But of course, that takes investment because before, we didn’t have audiences for this music. Now when I play there, it sells out. All the kids come – and they, also, want to become pianists and violinists. I feel extremely privileged that I have been able to give that impulse to others because it means that I can go home, not just as a person, but as an artist.”
In a way, he has become a spokesperson for Palestinian artists in the wider world, certainly in Europe. As a pianist, does he feel this is a role which has been thrust upon him? “Yes and no,” he says. “The role of a spokesperson is inevitable. I always stress the fact that I am a pianist and not a spokesperson – but the more I stress that, the more my role as a spokesperson becomes even stronger. But I don’t want to put on any uniform. If anything, what I speak for is our wish to develop our lives and to live in a way that is with dignity. To express our potential as individuals. The more I do what I do, the more that becomes clear by itself.”
Saleem Abboud Ashkar performs Mendelssohn and Mussorgsky with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Riccardo Chailly, at the NCH, Dublin on Sept 6. The programme includes Mendelssohn’s overture Fingal’s Cave and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain.
