Above: Emre Aracı talking to Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands after a concert at the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam on 14 December 2006
Emre Aracı is proceeding to the stage with the janissary instrument "chevgen" during a concert at St John's Church in Gdansk with the Sopot Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra on 18 October 2014.
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European Music at the Ottoman Court More than any other repertoire, this programme has become the hallmark of Emre Aracı's themed concerts, which he started to give during his postgraduate years at Edinburgh University with the Edinburgh University String Orchestra founded by him. To this day he continues to perform it with orchestras around the world. The repertoire is based on the European musical tradition in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, when the famous opera composer Gaetano Donizetti’s eldest brother Giuseppe Donizetti became master of music at the Turkish court. Better known as Donizetti Pasha, his influence prompted a fashion for Italian opera and European popular music within the palaces along the Bosphorus, where ladies of the harem learned to play the pianoforte with instruments imported from Vienna and the military bands of the sultans played marches by Rossini and the Donizetti brothers expressly written for them. The passion of the court for the ballroom music of Europe also resulted in royal compositions by members of the imperial family in the genres of polkas, marches and waltzes, to the extent of some even appearing in the catalogues of the publishing houses in Europe. Through Aracı’s orchestrations these ephemeral works have found a new lease of life and now take us to the unknown territory of forgotten compositions from the Ottoman Empire. While explaining the history of every individual work, Aracı also shows the levels of musical interchange that existed between East and West in an age which is now totally confined to the dusty shelves of archives. |
Emre Aracı with the Edinburgh University String Orchestra at the Reid Concert Hall in the early 1990s.
Edinburgh
Thursday, 13 November 1997 at the Roxburghe Hotel, Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, with the Edinburgh University String Orchestra The very first concert when Emre Aracı's arrangements of European Ottoman music were presented under his baton with musicians from the Edinburgh University String Orchestra, during a visit of the Turkish Ambassador Özdem Sanberk to Scotland, hosted by the Turkish Honorary Consul Ian Wittet. |
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