This concert brings together artists coming from different cultural backgrounds: Moneim Adwan is coming from Gaza and lives now in France; he sings and plays the ‘Ud, the traditional « Lute » in Arabic music. Soprano Alice Foccroulle and organist Bernard Foccroulle perform baroque and contemporary European music.

These two musical traditions, each extremely diverse and rich, differ in many aspects, one of them being the kind of transmission: the European music is written on scores, the Arabic music is transmitted orally. This program doesn’t try to make any kind of “fusion” of these traditions: it focuses sometimes on one style, sometimes on another one, it offers also moments of dialogue. It gives the audience a wonderful opportunity to enjoy these different musical traditions and to discover some connections as well as their specific characters.

Two main themes will structure the concert: exile and love. Love is the most universal human experience, and the Biblical “Song of Songs” is an extraordinary poem linking love between human beings as well as between human beings and God. Exile is today a cruel experience for a growing number of people, forced to leave their country because of war, terror or other disasters. The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwich has written beautiful poems about exile, most of them reflecting the concrete exile of many Palestinians and at the same time the universal feeling of spiritual exile that every human being can experience in one way or another.

Nature is another element common to these cultures: we all share the same earth, we are lightened by the sun and we contemplate the stars… The Mediterranean Sea plays an important role too in our representation of Eastern and Western exchanges, migrations and conflicts.

We hope this concert will allow the audience to enjoy these different styles of music and to share the human experiences and values that have inspired them.