Egypt in Music and Art: A Journey Through Time and Sound
There are moments in the life of any concertgoer when place, program, and performance align so completely that one feels less like an audience member and more like a participant in a living, unfolding artwork.
Such an evening unfolded at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and music director Leon Botstein presented Egypt in Music and Art as part of the museum’s Sight and Sound series—an inspired pairing with the Met’s luminous exhibition Divine Egypt.
To enter The Met on Fifth Avenue is already to step into the hallowed precincts of human imagination. To sit in its intimate Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, surrounded by masterworks of sculpture, painting, and ritual objects, is to experience something more: a sense that music and image, time and space, might for an hour or two occupy the same sacred air.
Maestro Botstein: The Illuminating Polymath
Before a single note sounded, Maestro Botstein offered what can only be described as a compact seminar in cultural history. With his characteristic blend of erudition and clarity, he traced how Egypt—real and imagined—captivated the European mind from Napoleon’s campaign through the age of canal-building and empire.
His narrative moved through the great powers of France, Britain, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose political and commercial ambitions fueled a craze for Egyptomania: obelisks in city squares, sphinxes on palace façades, and hieroglyphic motifs on everything from wallpaper to orchestral scores. He lingered on the Met’s own exhibition Divine Egypt, where nearly 250 works reveal how ancient Egyptians used images—statuary, reliefs, ritual objects—to make the gods present in daily life rather than distant abstractions.
Leon Botstein. Photo by Steve Pyke
Most illuminatingly, Botstein situated the evening’s program within modern debates about how images and artworks affect us. He noted Ernst Gombrich’s insistence that there is no “innocent eye”—that we see through habits, expectations, and cultural codes—and contrasted this with David Freedberg’s influential work on the “power of images,” which documents how people across time have treated images as if they were living agents: kissed, carried in procession, mutilated, or implored for help.
To this, Botstein added a musical-philosophical perspective from Susanne Langer, who argued that artworks—especially music—are “presentational symbols”: autonomous forms that articulate patterns of feeling and lived experience, not merely reflections of a viewer’s private whims. In that light, the evening’s scores and the sculptures in Divine Egypt could be heard and seen as parallel symbolic worlds: crafted forms whose internal logic and vitality press themselves upon us, even as we bring our own histories to bear.
By the time Botstein yielded the stage to his players, he had quietly given his audience a set of lenses—Gombrich’s attention to perception, Freedberg’s sense of image-agency, Langer’s notion of symbolic form—that made every subsequent bar and every nearby artifact feel more charged and intelligible.
Johann Strauss II’s Egyptian March: Viennese Charm Meets Oriental Color
The program opened with Johann Strauss II’s Egyptian March, Op. 335, composed in 1869 at the height of Europe’s fascination with the newly opened Suez Canal. It is not an ethnographic portrait of Egypt so much as a Viennese fantasy of it: a confection of crisp military rhythm, “Oriental” melodic turns, and shimmering orchestral color.
Botstein and TŌN made a persuasive case for the piece as something more than atmospheric fluff. The march’s opening gestures—pointed rhythms in the winds over murmuring strings—suggest both parade ground and caravan. There are harmonic sidesteps and modal inflections that flirt with exoticism, but always within Strauss’s impeccable sense of proportion.
Johann Strauss II at the Court Ball by Theo Zasche, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
TŌN’s strings played with a silken, blended sound, never losing the lightness that keeps Strauss afloat. The woodwinds chattered and arabesqued with delicious precision, while the brass offered just enough ceremonial blaze to suggest a European imagining of pharaonic grandeur without tipping into bombast. Their ensemble was taut; inner rhythms were clean, and the rubato felt natural, like a living march rather than a mechanical one.
What emerged was a gently ironic Egypt: the Egypt of operetta posters and illustrated travelogues, refracted through a Viennese prism. In the context of Divine Egypt, one could not help but sense the contrast between this charming pastiche and the hieratic stillness of the stone deities in the Met galleries. Where the statues compress divine power into a single, potent image, Strauss offers a glittering, danceable mirage.
Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture: Masonic Mystery and Classical Perfection
From Strauss’s salon-Egypt, the transition to W.A. Mozart’s overture to Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, felt less like a change of subject than a deepening of theme. If Strauss gives us Egypt as a European fantasy, The Magic Flute offers it as an esoteric allegory: a land of temples, trials, and enlightenment filtered through Freemasonry.
TŌN’s performance captured that ritual dimension from the first bar. The three solemn chords in E-flat major—the so-called “Masonic key,” with its three flats—rang out like the very knocks that begin a Masonic ceremony, at once architectural and ceremonial. Botstein allowed those chords to resonate fully, giving the sense of a door being opened into a sacred precinct.
Stage Set for a production of W. A. Mozart's Magic Flute by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The transition into the Allegro was ideally paced. The fugato writing, fleeting yet transparent, took on the character of a journey: motives passed from section to section like torches, illuminating different corners of the orchestral temple. Textures remained lucid; inner voices spoke clearly, yet there was always a sense of forward propulsion.
In the mind’s eye, one could see not only Mozart’s stage directions but also Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s famous Egyptianizing designs for early 19th-century productions, with their towering pylons, processional avenues, and star-studded skies. The music’s interplay of darkness and light, tension and resolution, matched the exhibition’s images of gods who are at once terrifying and protective.
Botstein and his players made the overture feel like an initiation rite: after the final E-flat blaze, one had the sense not merely of an introduction completed but of a threshold crossed. We had moved from the polite exoticism of Strauss into a realm where Egypt signifies something deeper—trial, purification, and the possibility of a higher order.
Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, “Egyptian”: Virtuosity and Vision
The evening’s central revelation was Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, Op. 103, the “Egyptian.” Written during the composer’s winter stay in Luxor and premiered in 1896 at his own jubilee concert in Paris, the work compresses a lifetime of stylistic experience into a single, richly colored canvas.
It is “Egyptian” in several senses. Saint-Saëns himself said the concerto evoked a sea voyage, and the score indeed feels like a journey through ports of call: from Parisian elegance to Mediterranean warmth, Levantine melismas, and even Javanese and Spanish echoes. The celebrated second movement draws on a Nubian love song or romantic Egyptian melody the composer reportedly heard sung along the Nile, woven into a texture of modal inflections and gently undulating ostinati.
Pianist Terrence Wilson, a Grammy-nominated artist and recipient of the SONY ES Award for Musical Excellence, the Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Juilliard Petschek Award, proved an ideal guide through this landscape. His tone combined steel and velvet; passagework sparkled, yet the singing lines never lost their vocal quality.
Terrence Wilson, Pianist. Photo by J. Henry Fair
In the first movement, Wilson and Botstein balanced classical clarity with a sense of narrative. Rapid figurations and bravura cadenzas never felt like a display for its own sake; they seemed instead like the musical equivalent of travel writing, charting vistas and digressions while always returning to a firm structural shore.
The slow movement was the heart of the performance. Here, Saint-Saëns’s Egyptian and Middle Eastern evocations came through not as clichés but as genuine attempts to hear and honor other musical idioms within a French symphonic frame. Wilson shaped the Nubian-inspired melody with a long, unbroken line, supported by TŌN’s delicately balanced strings and winds. The result was both sensual and contemplative, like a nocturne glimpsed from the deck of a ship anchored on the Nile.
The finale returned us to bright daylight and a bustling port. Rhythms snapped, accents danced, and TŌN’s brass and percussion gave the music a festive, almost carnival energy. Yet Wilson and Botstein never lost sight of the concerto’s architectural spine; the movement’s exuberance was always grounded in impeccable ensemble and a clear sense of destination.
By the final flourish, the audience had effectively completed the voyage promised at the start of the evening: from Vienna’s imaginary Egypt, through Mozart’s temple of initiation, to a late-Romantic French composer’s cosmopolitan, deeply personal dialogue with the East.
The Orchestra Now: A Legacy of Excellence and Innovation
Founded in 2015 as a graduate program of Bard College, The Orchestra Now (TŌN) represents one of the most imaginative approaches to orchestral training in the United States. Under the leadership of Leon Botstein, it offers young musicians full-tuition fellowships toward a master’s degree or advanced certificate that integrates performance with curatorial and critical studies.
TŌN performs regularly at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Fisher Center at Bard, tackling both core repertoire and rarely heard works. Its concerts often feature spoken introductions, visual elements, or thematic framing—like this Egypt program—that invite audiences into a richer, more historically aware kind of listening.
In Egypt, in Music and Art, one felt the fruits of that mission. The playing combined youthful energy with a seriousness of purpose; the musicians were not simply executing notes but engaging in a broader conversation with history, iconography, and philosophy.
A Triumph of Musical Enlightenment
As the audience emerged into the museum’s softly lit Egyptian galleries, many lingered among the statues of Horus, Hathor, Osiris, and the radiant gods of Divine Egypt with freshly opened ears and eyes. The evening had quietly enacted the very dynamic Freedberg and Langer help us name: objects and artworks that seem to address us, that feel somehow alive, not because we are credulous, but because their forms are so powerfully organized that they compel response.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) entrance façade in Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York City. Hugo Schneider, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
One left the auditorium not merely entertained but genuinely enriched—newly equipped to speak about Strauss’s glittering march, Mozart’s Masonic drama, and Saint-Saëns’s Egyptian voyage, and to relate them to the carved stone presences only steps away. In a cultural climate that often treats concerts as background or diversion, this collaboration between TŌN and The Met reaffirmed what the concert hall can still be: a place of initiation, connection, and transformation.
Discover the Sight and Sound Series
The TŌN’s Sight and Sound series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues to offer that rare alchemy of visual art and live orchestral performance, each program turning the museum itself into a kind of giant, resonant instrument. If Egypt in Music and Art is any indication, future installments promise journeys just as enlightening—whether through other cultures, other centuries, or the many ways art and music, together, still speak to our most profound questions about beauty, power, and meaning.
L-R: Leon Botstein and Pianist Terrence Wilson with The Orchestra Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a program entitled Diving Egypt. Photo by Edward Kliszus
Egypt in Music and Art: A Journey Through Time and Sound
Discover the Sight and Sound Series
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