NEWSWEEK

Tunes Among the Ruins
A comeback for a festival - and a nation.

A generation ago, an ancient market town in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley hosted one of the world’s chief cultural events. Top orchestras and dance troupes, the best international theatre companies, dazzling individual performers such as jazz trumpeter Miles Davis and ballet legend Rudolf Nureyev all clamoured to take part in the summer-long Baalbek International Festival. Baalbek mesmerised audiences and performers alike, and it’s not hard to see why. The main festival stage stood in front of the Corinthian-style columns of the second-century Temple of Bacchus, a structure larger than the Parthenon in Athens and almost perfectly preserved. The festival commissioned new works and hosted numerous world premieres. Then, in 1975, civil war tore Lebanon apart. or the next 15 years, the soaring columns of Bacchus’s temple echoed the sounds of armies and artillery, not symphonies and jazzmen.

Last Thursday, on a breezy summer night, the festival returned. Lebanon’s Caracalla Dance Theatre took the stage, and so did fresh hope that the country might again become the cultural flagship of the Arab world.

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This year’s Baalbek festival doesn’t match the glory of past extravaganzas. The modest event will last just one week and contain only two acts, both with ties to the prewar festival: Azerbaijan-born cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and the Caracalla Dance Theatre. In 1975, when war broke out, Rostropovich promised to play the festival as soon as it returned. It took far longer than expected, but he kept his pledge. This Thursday, Rostropovich and the 115-member Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France are scheduled to perform before the second-century temple. The internationally renowned Caracalla company opened the festival last week with a program titled “Andalusia, the Lost Glory”, a paean to the Arab conquest of Spain. Director Abdul Hali Caracalla, whose works blend Western and Arab traditions, was born in Baalbek. As a boy, he was inspired by the summer dance performances he saw and eventually started Lebanon’s first dance company in 1970. Last week he was visibly moved by the festival’s return. “It’s like a wedding for the country,” he told Newsweek.

Mark Dennis and David Gordon
04 August 1997