This was one of those song recitals that feels like an evening of storytelling rather than a couple of hours of wallowing in a beautiful voice. Not that Fatma Said’s soprano wasn’t a worthwhile end in itself: with unfailingly sensitive support from the pianist Joseph Middleton, her voice – soft-edged but bright, pliant and always expressive – sounded right at home in the intimate acoustic of Milton Court.
The first half was of classical songs – Mozart, Schubert, Schumann. Some were familiar, others less so, but all of them very much wanted to tell us something, whether about the fluster of forbidden attraction in Mozart’s Der Zauberer, where Said nicely caught the narrator’s indignance at her mother turning up and ruining the moment, or about the evening breeze conjured up in Abendempfindung, where she scaled her already soft singing back almost to a whisper. This was one of several songs that had moments so soft as to be almost sotto voce – Schumann’s Meine Rose was another, as was Schubert’s Ständchen from Schwanengesang, which began sounding dark and distant and ended with the feeling that deep and complex emotions had been uncovered.
It is good to find a singer so confident in their connection with their audience. Would it also have been good occasionally to hear Said broaden a phrase and let it soar just for the hell of it, regardless of what the words were saying? Perhaps, but in a way it’s refreshing that that’s not what this recital was about.
After the interval a geographical shift southwards brought songs in Spanish by Falla and Obradors. Falla’s Seven Popular Spanish Songs sounded wonderfully idiomatic: Middleton, hitting strings of fast repeated notes, made the piano ring almost like a guitar, while Said, who grew up in Egypt, laced her singing with the little catches, swoops and filigree ornaments common to flamenco and Arabic music, and sounded like a real Andalusian. There were more delicate, long-spun threads in Give Me the Flute and Sing, by the Lebanese composer Najib Hankash, before the encore, a relaxed, gently playful version of The Way You Look Tonight.
