عيدية...و ليد عبدالحميد يعيد تنويعات (جوهان سباستيان باخ) الستة إلى جذورها...

Quote: An African variation on famed work Sep 24, 2007 04:30 AM John Goddard Staff Reporter The "Year of Glenn Gould" begins audaciously tomorrow, with a free lunchtime concert by a Sudanese-born musician interpreting the music that made Gould famous. Waleed Abdulhamid is to perform Bach's "Goldberg Variations," which Gould turned into a masterpiece on a battered piano in 1955 when he was 22. Abdulhamid plays many instruments but piano is not one of them. Tomorrow, he is to play African percussion and to vocally chant – a challenge, he says, as he is observing Ramadan and cannot take so much as a sip of water all day. His seven-piece band will include a keyboard player with classical training. "But the concert," he says, "will be like Glenn Gould playing with African musicians in the forest." Abdulhamid comes to classical music circuitously. He grew up in Omdurman, the western sector of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum. Alliances formed by Sudan's left-leaning dictatorship in the 1970s meant that he took music lessons from a Chinese teacher in a school built by North Koreans. "We learned Bach, Mozart, most of the classical composers, but our teacher was from the army. I wasn't really in love with it," he says. As a young percussionist of Sudanese music, however, Abdulhamid proved precocious. As a teenager, he played in an orchestra for the renowned Abdel Karim El Kabli and later helped found Igd el Djilad, still Sudan's top pop band. In 1992, he moved to Toronto. Through classical programs on CBC Radio, he discovered Gould and "really fell in love with his art," he says. He loves all sorts of music."These days it's hard to describe a specific style," Abdulhamid says. "The whole world is coming together." At clubs around town he most often appears with Waleed Kush, the band he brings tomorrow to the Glenn Gould Studio in the CBC building. Earlier this year, Craig Scott, of the Craig Scott Gallery, commissioned Abdulhamid to perform the "Goldberg Variations" at the Berkeley Theatre, an event also featuring Nancy Houston reading from her novel of the same title. "We changed the time signature and added a lot of African percussion," Adbulhamid says of his band's contribution. "People screamed and went crazy. They loved it." Glenn Gould died at the age of 50 in 1982, but he would have turned 75 tomorrow. In his honour, at noon tomorrow, a section of Metro Square next to the CBC building is to be named after him. The one-hour concert follows inside from 1:15 p.m. Details are at glenngouldstudio.cbc.ca.[/QUOTE ] تحياتي مهــــا بشير