A Motif Worth Repeating

By Quan | 01 October 2026 | 8 min read

Soprano Fatma Said Interprets Ravel's Shéhérazade at Severance Hall

Looking Back: February 2022

“My wife was a violinist,” Richard revealed as we chatted at intermission. He had attended many of her concerts, which he spoke fondly of. He ushered me to my seat earlier here at Severance Hall, the beautiful concert hall next to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Soprano Fatma Said at Severance Hall

“I can see why you came up for this show,” as he described Soprano Fatma Said’s performance, talent, and fit for the piece. Said, the Egyptian Soprano, performed Ravel’s Shéhérazade, comprised of three songs, “Asie,” “La flûte enchantée,” and “L'indifférent.” The song cycle leads off her debut album, El Nour.

I came upon Ms. Said on ARTE Concert’s Christmas show with Daniel Hope. She sang carols in German, bringing to mind my German cousins. Later on, I learned she also performed in Italian, Spanish, French, English, and Arabic. The latter introducing me to songs such as “Aatini Al Naya Wa Ghanni” and “Yamana Beida.”

I was in awe of this polyglot and her French enunciation, maybe her 4th or 5th language, after listening to her album. So when an opportunity to see her came up I added an extra leg to Cleveland before a trip to New York to see her debut with the Cleveland Orchestra, the second time she would perform in the U.S.

Shéhérazade, Encompassing East to West

Shéhérazade is the famed narrator of One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), the collection of stories from various parts of the Middle East, India, and North Africa. The framing of the stories occurs over a period of a thousand and one nights as she delivers these tales to her husband, King Shahryar, in order to stave off death and execution for her and the women of the kingdom.

Maurice Ravel had co-founded an avant-garde art group in Paris named Les Apaches (The Hooligans) in the early 1900s. One of the members, Tristan Klingsor (pen name of Léon Leclère) had written a series of poems inspired by Rimsky-Korsakov's work, “Shéhérazade,” which Ravel admired as well. Ravel had never traveled to those distant lands, but was enamored with the character Shéhérazade. Inspired by Tristan's work, he set off to produce his song cycle around the poems: “Asie,” “La flûte enchantée,” and “L'indifférent.”

Fatma Said records Ravel: Shéhérazade, M. 17: II. La flûte enchantée

I used the occasion to attend Fatma Said's performance to do some studying of the poems in French as I was in the middle of B1 classes online with Alliance Francaise of Dallas.

Knowing that a woman from that region would be interpreting this outsider's viewpoint was interesting. One of the things I learned on her album's recording (El Nour) was the use of an instrument called a ney flute. Said explains:

“The ney’s timbre and minute expressive nuances are so similar to those of the human voice,” explains Fatma, “that the combination of flute and singer really does sound like an intimate conversation between two people in private.”

The ney's history extends back some 4,500 years to ancient Egypt and the choice to incorporate it into this interpretation of the song felt like a conversation between Ravel's piece and Said's reclamation in a way. To read a musician's description that there was nuance left me feeling like it's something I probably would have missed, but possibly felt, without the proper vocabulary to express what it was.

Fatma Said Takes a Bow

In listening to her performance, it helped me conceptualize vowel sounds and liaisons in French and also the extra syllable for -e endings sung in music or poetry, where the final -e is normally silent in spoken French. Like this line from “La flûte enchantée,”

Il me semble que chaque note s’envole
It seems as though every note flies

Text by Tristan Klingsor (Léon Leclère)
English translation by Hugh Macdonald

While I'll typically listen to podcasts, music, or shows in French, listening to French sung by a soprano this way was a new and textured variance in appreciating the language along with training my ear to recognize it in a new register. The time spent looking things up did help when I finally was there to enjoy her performance that evening. Although I couldn't latch on to everything, there were lines I would use as beats to recall moments in the songs visually in my mind.

By the end of her performance, conductor Stéphane Denève (a Frenchman from Tourcoing) took Fatma's hand to initiate a bow for the audience. The warmth of the crowd's applause severed any thoughts of the snowstorm that was brewing outside the concert hall.

Mahler's French Thread

After a short intermission, the Cleveland Orchestra's performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, ‘Titan,’ followed Said. In anticipation, I listened to it on Spotify via Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, a name I'm always fond of seeing because one of his nieces, Karen, was a mentor during college (for her he was Uncle Lenny). The story of how ‘Titan,’ evolved from being an early disaster to one of his most beloved pieces is an incredible story. It was one of several pieces I read in prepping myself for the context of the piece.

“Ultimately, it is about connection.”

One of the fun finds was a podcast by a Houston classical librarian named Dacia Clay, who was a self-professed newb at the genre itself (right up my alley). It is called Classical Classroom and during one episode, I learned how Mahler reworked the classic French children's song, Frère Jacques, into the third movement of Symphony No. 1, played in a minor key to evoke a haunting feeling for a funeral march. But Mahler may not have invented it as that's how it had been sung in Austria as early as the 19th century.

Nevertheless, there was a strand of French DNA in the piece, used as a bit of dark humor for this funeral march for a hunter being carried by animals in a forest. Mahler had been inspired by a piece of woodcut art by Moritz von Schwind called "The Hunter's Funeral" (Des Jägers Leichenbegängnis).

Final Cadence

John Long Severance, Businessman and Philanthropist

The algorithms must have gotten a hold of all my prepping because Yo-Yo Ma popped up one day in an ad for his MasterClass. In it, he recounts how he had the “audacity” to think that he could play a perfect concert. In the midst of seemingly so, he became “bored out of his mind.” An epiphany fell over him and he decided to “devote my life to human expression, versus human perfection.”

Ultimately, it is about connection. And funnily for me, this is how French is more often than not for me. The messy middle, the hesitancy to speak out of looking foolish, or feeling like you have to be perfect to participate. And I realized on this particular night, while I didn't comprehend everything Fatma Said sang or all of the movements Mahler's Symphony was trying to illustrate, I could still feel the performance and render something from it.

The conduit to it all this evening was the Cleveland Orchestra led by guest conductor Stéphane Denève. I’d forgotten how physical and magical it was seeing an orchestra work in concert, in flow, and hear music that didn’t pass through an amp. Even perched up from above, the design of the space delivered the emotions from below.

The orchestra's expression played out and by the fourth movement I saw some people wiping tears that fell short of their masks. “That was the best concert I’ve been to,” extolled a man nearby, quietly to his group. The final ovation rivaled the wind gusting outside as a snowstorm continued on.

The Cleveland Orchestra's Welcome Bag and Note

As I made my way out I came upon Richard again. Earlier he had come by to check in and told me he had requested to see if I could come down to meet Soprano Fatma Said. While she kindly declined, I laughed at the thought of them going out of the way to even offer that courtesy. Understandably, we were all still in the midst of a pandemic, and there was no need to introduce an additional risk of me taking out the singer who still had other performances to go. But that was just how they did things there.

Upon coming to my seat at the start, there was a tote bag with CDs and other goodies, and a note thanking me for making the trip up. I had left a comment on their Instagram post of the concert about looking forward to coming in from Texas to enjoy the show. Little did I know they'd read the innocuous note and go out of their way to make someone feel so welcomed.

I shook Richard's hand and thanked him for his hospitality, for the Cleveland Orchestra's warmth. He wished me safe travels and to come back again. A motif worth repeating.