The Lebanese artist Marcel Khalife and Shada played melodies of love and nostalgia for the land and the homeland and the yearning for freedom in memory of the passing away of his friend, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.
Khalifa presented a performance that dazzled the audience of the International Hammamet Festival in Tunisia, entitled “Mahmoud, Marcel and Me”.
On Wednesday evening, the Hammamet Theater was filled to the brim with an audience that came specifically to enjoy the show, which was presented for the first time in 2020 in France, and then traveled to several Arab and Western cities.
The audience enjoyed the magic of Khalifa playing the oud with the performance of his son Bashar Marcel Khalife on the piano and Sari Khalifa on the violin accompanied by four players on guitar, accordion, saxophone and cello.
Marcel began the night with the song “Beirut” in honor of the victims of the harbor explosion that shook the Lebanese capital two years ago.
Among the masterpieces of Darwish’s poems, he sang “This sea is mine”, “We will meet shortly”, “Afraid of the moon”, “I am Joseph, my father”, “My God, why have you forsaken me” and “We know the past and do not move on”.
At the insistence of the audience, Khalifa presented his songs that were deeply etched in the memory of the Arab peoples, such as “Rita”, “Fel Bal Song” and “The Pigeon Fly”.
Marcel Khalife revealed in a press conference after the show that he had been immersed in writing an operatic music for Mahmoud Darwish’s “mural” poem about two years ago, noting that he had forcibly abandoned a large part of the mural due to the length of time.
The nights of the 65th International Hammamet Festival, which is held in the coastal city of the same name in northeastern Tunisia, will continue until the nineteenth of August.
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