Aghadan alkak oum kalsoum biography

Oum Kalsoum - Aghadan Alkaak (Shall I See You) LP Vinyl NEW/SEALED
"All Arabs agree," reads The Rough Guide to World Music. "Om Kolthoum is indisputably the Arab world's greatest singer."
Om Kolthoum was an internationally famous Egyptian singer, songwriter, and film actress ave from the 1920s to the 1970s. Known for her extraordinary vocal ability and style, She was one of the greatest and most influential Arab singers of the 20th century and is arguably the single most prominent Arab woman in contemporary Arab history. When she died in 1975 at the age of 70, 4 million people poured into the streets of Cairo to mourn her passing.
Her songs deal mostly with the universal themes of love, longing and loss. They are nothing short of epic in scale, with durations measured in hours rather than minutes. A typical Umm Kulthum concert consisted of the performance of two or three songs over a period of three to four hours. In the late 1960s, due to her age and weakened vocal abilities, she began to shorten her performances to two songs over a p

When the Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum took to the stage at Lebanon’s Baalbeck International Festival for the last time in 1970, she was at the end of a career that had enraptured the Arab world. Over the course of almost 50 years, her voice had captured the collective imagination, brought pleasure to millions, and become a powerful symbol of Arab nationalism.

Now, 48 years later, her music is to grace the festival’s stage once again, with this year’s program kicking off on Friday, July 20 with “Baalbeck Remembers Umm Kulthum,” a 90-minute homage to the ‘Star of the Orient.’

“Everything about Umm Kulthum stands out,” says the Egyptian composer and conductor Hisham Gabr, who is to lead the celebrations. “Her voice, her mastery, her ability to improvise, and the way that she uses this incredible array of nuances in her voice to express the tiniest and slightest details of the words that she’s singing. She reincarnates melody, reinvents it in so many ways that are quite stunning and amazing. And yet she never loses track of what those words mean and how she can convey and augment those meanings to her listeners.”

The music of Umm Kulthum was formed in what is now an unrecognizable era — a golden age of Arab musical endeavor epitomized by Umm Kulthum and other greats including Mohammed Abdel Wahab and Abdel Halim Hafez. She mesmerized audiences, singing songs such as “Enta Omri” and “Al Atlal” with such raw emotional power that they continue to hold sway over great swathes of the Arab world. 

She was blessed with great range and virtuosity, and had the ability to link musical improvisation with the lyrics she was singing. During her live radio broadcasts, which traditionally took place on Thursday evenings, she would often sing the same melody in a variety of different ways, performing three or four songs over the course of a few hours and bringing cities to a standstill.

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