AUC Celebrates 250 Years of Beethoven
By: Farida El Deeb
@FaridaAEldeeb
The Chamber Music Concert, organized by AUC’s Department of Arts’ Music program recently celebrated 250 years of Beethoven’s music.
The performance featured Wessam Amin on the oboe, Laura Virtanen-Armin on the violin, Rasha Yehia on the viola and Mohamed Salah on the violoncello.
For the Cairo Symphony Orchestra, Amin plays the principal oboe, Virtanen-Armin, is the principal second violinist, and Salah is the principal cello.
They held one concert at Malak Gabr Theater at the New Cairo campus on Monday, March 9, and were set to hold another on Thursday, March 12, at Oriental Hall at Tahrir campus which was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ludwig Van Beethoven was born in Bonn, Germany in December 1770 and died in Vienna, Austria on March 26, 1827.
“We thought Beethoven suits well this year because it’s the 250th anniversary of his birth. So we thought we’d program something around the idea of Beethoven and that’s why this sort of Viennese classical school comes to mind because just to play music of the same time yet in a different style,” said Virtanen-Armin.
The performers first started by playing three pieces by Mozart. They then moved on to perform four pieces by Beethoven.
Virtanen-Armin stated that Mozart and Beethoven were both composers who lived in Vienna; Mozart was born 14 years before Beethoven.
“Beethoven would have heard a lot of Mozart music. So [Mozart would] have had an influence on his own writing style, and he would have known what was written before him so he would have heard and been influenced by all this,” Virtanen-Armin said.
Virtanen-Armin said that she hopes that attending classical music concerts would make the music accessible to anyone as she believes that one does not have to understand classical music to enjoy it.
According to a Bauer Media group, a study conducted by Scala classical Radio stated that young audiences enjoy classical music as an emotional escape and 45 percent of them want to know more about the classical genre. Scala Radio was launched in March 2019.
Virtanen-Armin stated that a lot of the compositional elements that were developed by Beethoven, can even be heard now when listening to pop music without having to go back 200 years to when it all started.
“So I would say [those elements] even affect different styles in the 20th century,” said Virtanen-Armin.
For Virtanen-Armin, music can be both entertaining and therapeutic, she forgets her worries when attending a concert and enjoys it.
“The performance, in my opinion, was something different just because I haven’t been to many classical concerto’s before, I sat there thinking of how different music is nowadays yet the classics are still intact and recited all over the world,” said Integrated Marketing Communication graduating senior Mayar El Gamal.
El Gamal believes that Mozart and Beethoven, although different in terms of music composition, have both played big roles in creating fundamentals in the roots of music and turned it into what it has become today.
According to Music is Elementary, an online music education website, some modern-day examples of music pieces that were influenced by Beethoven’s composition include Careful With That Axe, Eugene, and Saucerful of Secrets by Pink Floyd.
