The Lebanese musician and composer walked on-stage to rapturous applause. With white hair and a beard, he looks like an Old Testament prophet, with a red scarf stylishly draped around his neck. He sat centre stage with his oud and when he wasn’t playing or singing, conducted the seven-piece Al Mayadine Ensemble behind him.
Now in his mid-sixties, Marcel Khalifé is one of the legends of Arabic music — an Arabic Bob Dylan — and since 2005 a Unesco Artist for Peace. The Barbican was packed to hear him sing his most celebrated songs. He said not a word in English but, apart from singing the songs, he said very little in Arabic either.
Musically the band is strong — particularly his son, Rami Khalifé, on the piano, Anthony Millet on accordion, with a lead role in a tango number, and Ismail Lumanovski on snaky, Turkish-style clarinet. The arrangements move deftly from full band to individual solos and instrumental groups.
Some songs, like Mother, he sang solo, accompanied only by guitar. With other songs, he just had to play the first few notes and the audience took over knowing the words and melody by heart — for instance Walking Tall, a song about Palestinian pride, and Rita and the Rifle, about an impossible love story between a Palestinian and female Israeli soldier.
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The words are by the late Mahmoud Darwish, widely seen as the Palestinian national poet.
A woman from Nazareth a couple of seats away from me was dabbing tears from her eyes.
The whole hall was on their feet for the closing Fisherman’s Song — an anthemic number about strength in unity — which has gained even more resonance with the uncertain progress of the Arab Spring. A clear demonstration of the consoling and inspiring power of music.
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