World of music

Vienna [ENA] As a child I loved to look through kaleidoscope. The colorful stones inside the kaleidoscope were turning making beautiful and colorful settings. The Salam Orient Festival gave me the same impression. It was beautiful, colorful, diverse. It had various artists, various styles of music and took place at various locations. It was the best reflection of the variety and richness of the oriental cultures.

The festival provided the events to each taste. Here there were rock clubs with almost rocky modern oriental music. The rock events took places in two locations: the rock club Flex and WUK. The Bedouin Burger brought to publicum the combination of the nomadic life, jazz and Arabic music and made the soul of the listeners to travel together with the singer Lynn Adib who has Bedouin routes. The second musician Zeid Hamdan is called the “King of underground music of the Middle East” and is famous for his mixtures of pop sounds and classical Arabic poetry and Egyptian pop while using at the same time the analogue synthesizer and the old drum machines.

The Moroccan singer Yousra Mansour and French musician Brice Bottin in their concert in WUK gave tribute to the Gnawa and Chaabi cultures as well as to the youth movement and a new wave of Moroccan artists who are guided by local heritage and freedom of the Moroccan-Arabic Darija dialect. The festival opened with the concert of the musician from Senegal, the famous Marema, who brought to dance the entire publicum. Nobody could sit on places following her joyful and energetic music. Marema was nominated as the “Best Female Artist in Africa” by RFI award and had tours in several African countries. Now Marema lives in Vienna. The concert took place in the Sargfabrik.

The classical music ORF radio house hosted the internationally famous Kanun virtuoso and composer Sofia Labropoulou who is famous for her fusion of the Greek and Mediterranean folk music which also includes Ottoman and medieval music as well as experimental and modern music. Her broad repertoire and fantastic voice is inspired by such variety of sources as the Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, the ancient Greek methodology, the Turkish, Arabic and Greek folk music as well as by the modern music.

The second exotic performance took place in the cultural institute of Azerbaijan. Sahib Pashazade presented to publicum the Mugham music which is recognized by UNESCO as one of the Intangible Cultural Heritages of humanity. Kamran Kerimov performed the music on the renowned Nagara drum and Azad Alimammadov was playing on the wind instrument known as Balaban. While listening to the music someone could really imaging the landscape of Azerbaijan.

The theatric atmosphere of the Theater Akzent which hosted by far the festival highlight. This is a truly international and diversity group which brings together four women from various countries of the Sahara region. That is why they are called “Les Sahariennes”, the inhabitants of Sahara. That is why they are called “Les Sahariennes”, the inhabitants of Sahara. The four extraordinary singers are coming from Algeria, Morocco, West Sahara and Mauritania. Noura Mint Seymali, Malika Zarra, Souad Asla and Dighya Mohammad Salem bring together the diversity of the culture of people in Sahara in their fulminant and energetic concert. They give extremely joyful and positive atmosphere which brings the spectators beyond the borders.