CAIRO: “Normalization in the Middle East is not a good thing. I don’t accept normalization; I’m against normalization because we don’t want to let things stay the same. With these brief, frank words, prominent Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim silenced his critics following one of the most astounding classical performances the Cairo Opera House …

CAIRO: In an exclusive telephone interview with Daily News Egypt from his home in Germany, Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim attempted to correct one of the key assumptions of his critics in Egypt. “I’m not representing the Israeli government. I’m coming [to Egypt] as a private person who has been very critical of the …

English novelist and cultural historian Marina Warner says she has been dealt a “rather weird hand in terms of personal circumstances, a fact that she has put to good use in her writing over the years. Born to an ex-colonel of the British Army and an Italian mother raised under Fascism, Warner herself was shuffled …

Palestinian writer Maliha Maslamani’s new play, scheduled to be performed at Cairo’s Rawabet Theater next week, is a continuation of her ongoing fascination with the question of identity, an issue she has explored in both prose and play form before. The one-woman show titled “Monodrama sees Maslamani take on a series of characters in a …

Some art lovers wandering the booths and galleries of this year’s Biennale may be hard pressed to identify this year’s theme among the many works on display. The officially designated theme of “the other appears a little lost amid the clutter of sculpture, video, painting and installation. Where it is present, it is often only …

With just a few minutes to go before the opening of Darb 17 18, Cairo’s latest contribution to the national contemporary art scene, things were not yet quite in place. While a gaggle of invited artists smoked and chatted in the street on Sunday night, workmen were busy inside the plush new art center, installing …

There was a time when all anybody wanted in their Christmas stocking was a partridge, a pair tree and maybe a few maids a-milking. These days people are somewhat more demanding. Christmas just wouldn’t be the Yuletide season without a good book in the proverbial sock. Luckily, each year brings its own crop of top-notch …

Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of what you’re missing by living abroad, either to provoke a little homesick nostalgia, or to re-confirm your resolve to stay away. For some of the expat patrons of Downtown’s After Eight club, the recent performance of rock band Portal might well have been a slice of life from …

British jazz pianist Alex Wilson is one of those infuriating people blessed with not only an abundance of natural talent, but also a fair helping of personal charm. Both were on full display at his first performance for the Jazz Factory music festival, a set of three solo piano pieces played beneath the vaulted ceiling …

This past week saw the final installment of the Caravan of the Euro-Arab Cinema, a touring procession of movies and documentaries spread over three years, showing in various cities in Europe and the Arab world. As such, one would have liked to have seen the final event go with a whoosh and a bang. Instead, …

Czech film director Václav Marhoul says that his latest work, “Tobruk, is not a movie about a war; it is a movie about the people in a war. The distinction, he says, is all important. “The film was originally inspired by a book called ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ by the American author Stephen Crane, …

The children playing football in a side street near the Ibn Toloun Mosque last Sunday evening were well aware that somebody important was visiting their neighborhood. The main road was being sluiced down by street cleaners and holes filled with rubble. A dozen or so serious-looking men with walkie-talkies were prowling the area in search …

The last written words in Rawi Hage’s debut novel are: “Any resemblance of characters in this novel to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. It is a sentence tacked onto the bottom of the acknowledgements, and seems a little out of place in a work of fiction. Indeed, it stands in sharp contrast to …

A great many expat journalists in exotic places will recognize something of their own lives, not to mention their own selves, in Rowan Somerville’s first novel “The End of Sleep. The central character is an Irishman named Fin, who arrived in Cairo a few years back with a white linen suit and pretensions to journalistic …

English author Alan Smart’s collection of three short stories takes its title from Egypt’s second largest city. But the tales in “Alexandria Lost are not studies in romanticizing the city; rather they paint images of decay, squalor and dislocation. The first of the stories, “Sunstruck – Al-Alamein 1945, tells of an Italian doctor who served …

When American historian Jason Thompson was first asked to write a compact single-volume history of Egypt for the AUC Press, his first reaction was to decline. After all, such a work would span several thousand years, and take in some huge shifts in language, creed and culture, each one normally considered the domain of specialists. …

Standing among the assembled audience as it milled around in the courtyard of the Cairo Opera House on Wednesday evening, I must admit to feeling a little skeptical. The show we had gathered to see was billed as “a unique musical creation that will transform the Opera House into a giant instrument. Something involving microphones, …

The Carsten Daerr Trio can’t be entirely blamed for the two women who walked out a little way into their performance at the Cairo Opera House on Sunday night. The absconding young ladies were no doubt expecting a performance more in tune with the traditional understanding of the word ‘jazz’. Perhaps something in the line …

Picture the scene, if you will. A Spanish family is seated in the kitchen one summer s evening, the dinner finished, the dishes washed, when the radio crackles into life. A hush goes around and soon the kitchen in filled with the strains of that most beloved of national art forms, flamenco. It is some …

The untimely death of Khedive Tewfiq, ruler of Egypt from 1879 to 1892, took the nation, not to mention the rest of the world, somewhat by surprise. An article in The New York Times dated Jan. 7, 1892, reads: “The death of the Khedive was entirely unexpected. It was stated this evening that he was …

We are on our bellies now, crawling through silky-fine sand, watching the shadows for vipers and scorpions. Inches above our heads is a huge rock, the roof of a collapsed chamber, supported by walls cut from soft, rather crumbly sandstone. Ahead of me, my companion switches on his head torch and lights up the chamber, …

Palestinian novelist and journalist Ghada Karmi says that writing is a bit like parenthood. You conceive, you give birth, and you tend to the baby. But long after the initial excitement has passed, the duty remains to see the project through adolescence and into a fruitful adulthood. Similarly, if the ideas in her new book …