telegraph: how young iraqis came together to play beethoven

www.telegraph.co.uk 3. Oktober 2011

How young Iraqis came together to play Beethoven in Bonn

Zuhal Sultan, the music student behind the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq That critics respond to things rather than initiate them is why, you might argue, they don't lead terribly useful lives. But they do make suggestions. And two years ago I made a suggestion to Ilona Schmiel, the lady who runs the Bonn Beethovenfest, that had interesting results last weekend.

I told her about the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq, an official-sounding organisation that at the time was no more than an idea and a batch of emails passing between a Scottish conductor called Paul MacAlindin (who I happened to know) and a feisty young music student in Baghdad who thought the idea worth pushing.

It took a lot of push, but it was also the sort of thing that ticked boxes under various political agendas.

And as the Beethovenfest had a track record for encouraging youth orchestras I suggested it encourage this one, putting Schmiel and MacAlindin in contact.

Two years on, the NYOI arrived in Bonn last weekend for its first trip beyond Iraqi borders. And to say it was an event would be an understatement. The German president turned up. The German media came by the coach-load. There was a lot of politics, far too many speeches. And somewhere in the

middle of it all were 50 young Iraqis (Kurdish, Turkmen, all ethnicities together) taking things bizarrely in their stride. If they were shell-shocked by the experience, they didn't show it. But why should they?

Many of them must have dealt with shells of a more literal kind, beside which this was nothing.

Musically of course, they weren't the Berlin Philharmonic: it was raw and heavy playing with a fair percentage of off-notes. But in the circumstances, it's a miracle that there were any notes at all. The past few years haven't exactly been a boom-time for Iraq's artistic life. A fair number of the players in this orchestra are self-taught, learning from the internet because there were no music teachers to be found. They've had to beg and borrow instruments. And getting together for rehearsals hasn't been easy – which is why MacAlindin shifted the orchestra's base from Baghdad to Erbil. It was safer.

MacAlindin has in fact done sterling work with his young band (young being a slightly loose concept here: the age range runs to 28 – understandably when a lot of these players spent their genuine youth preoccupied with other things. Like staying alive). The standard was far better than I'd ever have expected, with a sense of shape and order that responded well to MacAlindin's clear, strong beat. And though I can't say much for the two new pieces of Iraqi music that got premiered in the concert – one of them a programmatic piece about a lonely camel in the desert that sounded like the score to a 1950s Ali Baba film – there were very creditable attempts at a Haydn symphony and at the Beethoven Violin Concerto, for which the festival had ambitiously paired the band with pukker soloist Arabella Steinbacher. Her presence raised the stakes considerably, and she did it with an admirable amount of generosity and class: not every soloist I can think of would have been so accommodating.

Where the band goes from here I don't know. It's been supported by the British Council (three cheers for the British Council), and perhaps a future step would be to bring the players over here for some coaching and concerts. But meanwhile there's some sorting out to do. The speech-making in Bonn was heavy with portentous, reverential intonations of the title 'National Orchestra of Iraq'; but the fact is, these words have no meaning, because the band still has no legal or official status. Two years on and it remains de facto: still no more than emails on Paul MacAlindin's laptop. The Iraqi government, British Council, and whichever other parties claim an interest, need to do some looking into that.