haydn and al-husary

These days I feel as though I’m studying in every spare moment. My studies are entirely voluntary, nothing to do with my work, so it’s actually a pleasure; I feel most alive when I’m learning.

I have joined the Manama Singers again, who have just started to rehearse The Creation by Haydn (which celebrates the creation of the world as described in the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost). The Manama Singers hold three or four concerts a year, but after I sang in Mozart’s Requiem last year (my first time singing in a choir), I was either too busy to rehearse for subsequent concerts, or not really drawn to the works being perfomed. I’m super busy at the moment, but I couldn’t resist an oratorio like The Creation, so have duly started to learn it (which for me means listening endlessly to the alto part in order to make it stick).

When I am not listening to Haydn, I am listening to Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary. My tajweed classes continue, and of course the better I prepare the more progress I make. I listen to Al-Husary because I find his recitation very clear; I came across it when I was attempting my juz’-a-day project in Ramadan a few years ago. (I must have extolled the virtues of his recitation then as well, as I recently bumped into the teacher of the Qur’an classes I was taking around that time, and he said, “Whenever I hear Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary I think of you.”)

Here is a beautiful performance by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, of Stimmt an die Saiten (Awake the harp) from The Creation:



To listen to Sheikh Mahmoud Khalil Al-Husary click here.

For more on Al-Husary see this programme (in three parts, in Arabic): 1, 2, 3. You can see footage of him on hajj in (I think) 1958 here.