MESSAGE FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
Essence of time, Spirit of place
Over the last twelve years, the Fes Festival of World Sacred Music has built up such prestige that it has become the envy of other international festivals. This thirteenth edition continues in the spirit of such enterprise and offers the public a superb programme.
The Festival opens and closes with what promise to be remarkable evenings, as in past years: Barbara Hendricks presents a new repertoire for the first concert, and the London Community Gospel Choir offers an anthology of its most beautiful sacred music to end the 2007 programme.
This year marks the 800 th anniversary of the birth of the great mystical poet, Jalaluddin Rumi. His poems feature strongly during the festival; in Turkish, during the moving ceremony of the Mawlawi and Qadiri Brotherhoods of Istanbul; in Persian, with the great singer Parissa and the Dastan Ensemble; in Arabic, in a performance celebrating Arab song with Waed Bouhassoun; and in Urdu, with the Qawali masters of Pakistan .
As usual, star performers from all continents and of all faiths come to Fes to avow their commitment to peace and dialogue between all people. They come to the sounds of flutes and Sufi songs, like Bartabas on his horse Le Caravage, to greet the dawning of a new day, a new day of love.
Cherif Khaznadar