Holy Week in the Holy Land

Holy Week began for me last night. A priest friend took me to a production at the Maronite Church in Nazareth, where children from the Catholic school in Raineh took the congregation through the final days of Jesus' life.

I have to say I was blown away. Interspersed with readings, the performance consisted mostly of symbolic reenactments of the Passion accompanied by choral music, much of which was taken from Fairuz's Easter collection. The director, Samer Kheshaiboun who teaches at the school, got a phenomenal response from the young children in the choir. I have rarely heard such sensitivity to dynamics from a kids choir, and a couple of hours into the service they were still giving it laldy.

But probably the highlights for me were the Fairuz numbers rendered by a 19-year old singer called Ahlam Khoury. Though the dramatic sequences were iconographic, her voice rendered them tantalisingly imminent. A voice with immense strength but all the dexterity needed to make each quarter-tone interval count, and I mean count to the point of goosebumps and tingles. As she sang Al Yom Ollika I could have cried.

Even better, none of the soloists forgot that they were narrators, servants of a story. It was a lesson in performance, particularly of sacred music. They transported the congregation from the attitude of an audience to that of participants in something sacred, confidants of God, bearers of a mystery. It was that special.