In recent years Fatma has performed in many major international concert halls and opera houses. In 2016, she became a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, and in 2019 an exclusive Warner Recording Artist. Subsequently, she moved to Europe – first, in 2009 to study at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin, and then to Milan where she was awarded a scholarship to study at the Accademia del Teatro alla Scala.

And, this is my aim in recitals, too – to speak to all people, to do something different and to introduce classical music to new audiences.”įatma’s own musical career began in her home city of Cairo when, aged 14, she took singing lessons with the Egyptian soprano Neveen Allouba.

I’m not diminishing an intellectual engagement with music, and I love preparing, studying and gaining knowledge about my repertoire, but for me music exists in one’s ear and body, it’s about connecting all the senses.” Given Kaleidoscope’s wide range of genres and styles, I wonder who Fatma imagines the audience for this disc will be? “I want to bring listeners together, to connect very different audiences. But, audiences don’t interpret music intellectually, they connect intuitively to a performance, an interpretation. I feel it rather than intellectualise it, though of course in song the words are extremely important. “Yes, I have a strong physical response to music. When I suggest that Fatma seems to respond to music in a very instinctive, physical manner, she agrees. So, I start with classical music and then take the listener on a journey, through bolero, tarantella, tango, swing, chanson and on to pop.” It’s universal.” Dance is the common element which brings these styles together. “My influences didn’t come from classical music, but from pop, Latin, chansons from the 1960s to the 1980s – singers such as Chris de Burgh, Elton John, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Shakira, Mariah Carey. In conversation, Fatma tells me that this diversity represents the music that she has always listened to. It’s a montage of songs each of which has its own story to tell, through melody but, perhaps more importantly, through rhythm. In the introductory note to the disc, Fatma describes her recital as ‘just one singer who is breathing life into all the personalities made to sing and dance through this album, so as you move through these selections, you’ll be presented with a kaleidoscopic rendering of my voice, turning and changing as it inhabits these different characters and situations with shifting colours and varied themes inspired by dance’. She’s accompanied by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo, conducted by Sascha Goetzel, and also by Quinteto Ángel, vision string quartet, and other independent musicians.

Kaleidoscope (OED): ‘an optical instrument containing pieces of coloured glass which may be rotated into constantly altering, brightly coloured, symmetrical figures and reflections a constantly changing group of bright colours or coloured objects anything which exhibits a succession of shifting phases’.įatma Said’s new recording, Kaleidoscope – which follows the Egyptian soprano’s first, multi-award winning debut disc, El Nour – presents a cross-cultural, multi-genre programme, the phases of which shift from opera to operetta, from cinema to tango, from music theatre to pop.

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