Cairo Opera House has organized an online concert for Thursday, March 26 at 9 pm featuring a collection of pieces by famed Egyptian composer Omar Khairat, as part of the initiative “Khalek fe al-Beit..Thakafa ben eadeak” [Stay home..Culture in your hands], the Cairo Opera House announced in a recent Facebook post.
The concert will be streamed on Culture Ministry’s YouTube channel and will be attended by Ali al-Hajar, Medhat Saleh, Reham Abdel-Hakim and Amina Khairat as well.
Egypt’s Culture Ministry announced in a statement last week that it would begin broadcasting concerts, ballets, plays, and short films from the Ministry’s archives on its YouTube channel and social media accounts, to encourage Egyptians to stay home amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The Egyptian Culture Ministry’s Youtube channel broadcast the ballet version of the iconic puppet musical El Leila El Kebira on Wednesday at 9 pm as part of the same initiative.
Omar Khairat is a famous Egyptian composer and pianist and the founder and conductor of the Omar Khairat Band.
He was born in Cairo and raised in a family of musicians. His uncle, Abou-Bakr Khairat, is the great Egyptian composer of classical music, part of the first generation of such composers in Egypt.
An architect by profession, About-Bakr Khairat studied privately in Paris and founded the Cairo Conservatoire, which is regarded as the premier music conservatory in Egypt.
Omar Khairat, About-Bakr Khairat’s nephew, entered the observatory in 1959, studied piano with Italian Maestro Vincenzo Carro, and took courses in music theory and composition at Trinity College in England.
Khairat, whose music is said to bridge the divide between contemporary Egyptian and Western genres, has composed a number of works, including The Magic Perfumes (1989) and Arabic Rhapsody (1992). His compositions have been featured in various movies and TV shows and he has performed at the Cairo Opera House a number of times.
