Perth Festival: The Ayoub Sisters & The Lark Piano Trio
Perth Concert Hall - 22/05/23
The Ayoub Sisters: Sarah & Laura Ayoub
The Lark Piano Trio: Emma Baird, violin | Helena La Grand, cello | Anna Michels, piano
Perth Concert Hall welcomed Scottish/Egyptian classical/crossover duo, Sarah & Laura Ayoub, as a Perth Festival headline act, on the night of 22nd May, supported by an emerging and supremely talented chamber music group from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, The Lark Piano Trio.
The piano trio opened the programme with two rarely heard works, Rebecca Clarke’s 1921 Piano Trio and an arrangement of ‘Summer’ (Verano Porteño) from Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Four Seasons of Buenos Aires’. It was immediately evident that not only do these three young musicians relish a mission to bring unjustly neglected repertoire into the limelight, awarding it the utmost advocacy through the pursuit of performing excellence, but they exemplify while doing so the joy of chamber music making. Full marks to the Perth Festival for bringing us this excellent group in an inspired programmed pairing.
Rebecca Clarke, a virtuoso violist and a pioneer of the inclusion of female players in professional orchestras, was also a composer with a very individual voice, at times not dissimilar to, yet distinct from those of Bloch, Ravel and Vaughan Williams. Her Piano Trio in 3 movements comprises a dramatic portrait of trauma and conflict, a soulful archlike meditation and a folkdance-like finale with an English feel, yet not unlike those of Kodály. The playing was committed, expressive and thoroughly persuasive and left me needing to seek out a second hearing and many more in the future. The Piazzolla, unsurprisingly, had the pulse of a tango, a slower smoochier dance embedded in a more traditional passionate one. Good clean fun marvellously realised.
Of course, the audience had come to see and hear the headline act and, after the interval, the multi-instrumental multi-genre players, composers and arrangers, Laura and Sarah Ayoub arrived on stage with violin and cello respectively. Their wide-ranging repertoire includes classical, pop, Arabic and fusion of all these elements. On the floor, foot-operated digital samplers permitted multiple rhythm and backing instrumental tracks to be laid down and looped during performance, the rhythm ingeniously derived from tapping the belly of their instruments. Their own arrangement of ‘Misirlou’ from the film ‘Pulp Fiction’, which began their programme, featured an atmospheric sul ponticello introduction evoking the sound of the ney and oud, complete with quarter-tone displacements. They took turns to introduce the remaining programme items.
Next up, an ingenious fusion of Scottish and Arabic elements included a reel and the dance tune known in Ireland as ‘Sail Around the Rocks’. Two prayers, one Coptic and one Muslim, featured in the next number, at first separately and then together, each emerging as a perfect countermelody to the other – very lovely. The next piece, their own composition ‘Storm’, grew out of a torridly hot and humid summer’s day in 2019, when they were unproductively brainstorming in a London studio, when an apocalyptic thunderstorm erupted suddenly and they abandoned the work. Months later, during lockdown back in Scotland, they revisited the material and quickly fashioned the dramatic stormy piece.
Paul McCartney’s evergreen classic, ‘Blackbird’ in a fine arrangement, was enthusiastically applauded. A Bollywood/Celtic fusion piece followed. Their arrangement from their recent album ‘Arabesque’ of the Egyptian folksong, ‘Fatma’ was also well-received. The “Hymn to Isis” which followed was inspired by watching spectacular but eerie coverage of the Egyptian event of 2021, the ‘Royal Mummies Parade’, when ancient pharaonic mummies were ceremonially transported to a new museum. Spectacular too for the Perth audience was the duo arrangement of Monti’s Czardas, the faster bits with flawless articulation at breakneck speed, greeted by thunderous applause. Boney M’s ‘Rasputin’ and Mozart’s ‘Rondo Alla Turca’ completed the violin and cello duo music of the evening.
For an encore, Sarah moved to the piano and the evening ended with a Scottish violin and piano medley, comprising ‘Flower of Scotland’, ‘Auld Land Syne’, ‘My Luve is like a Red, Red Rose’, ‘Loch Lomond’, ‘Highland Cathedral’, and ‘Mairi’s Wedding’.
The Ayoub Sisters are engaging, charming and skilful performers, draw on an apparently inexhaustible vein of cultural and artistic variety, are possessed of astounding technical ability, but, above all, display surpassing and radiant musicianship. Perth has taken them to its heart.