Of Wine and Music, a festival with a warm atmosphere in Smar Jbeil. (Credit: Roger Moukarzel, provided by the festival.)
On the heights of Batroun stands a proud medieval citadel that, not so long ago, was rather unknown. It looms over the vineyards that stretch toward the sea and give the region its quality wines. The citadel of Smar Jbeil is regaining its former glory with 'Wine and Music', the festival launched in 2022 at the initiative of composer and singer Khaled Mouzannar, husband of Nadine Labaki, if there was any need to clarify.
The event’s purpose — as its name suggests — is to offer tastings of the region's wines alongside concerts of mixed-genre music.
The genesis
It was during the Covid era. All festivals were canceled. Mouzannar spent a year in his corner of the forest, a time for reflection, a return to roots, to the essentials. The essentials surrounding him were: nature, viticulture, and music.
That was all he needed to initiate "Wine and Music." An ode to the land and to memory, the project led by the composer seeks to marry music and wine with history in the background. The festival welcomes major names from the musical world across a myriad of genres to the heart of this citadel — once a base for the Syrian army during the dark years — which Mouzannar particularly loves and that had been neglected.
"As soon as I launched the festival, I received a message from an emigrant from the region settled in the United States who said he was moved to see this citadel he used to observe as a child, then bearing a Syrian flag, regaining its original cultural purpose. This just goes to show that art always ends up triumphing over violence. My little revenge on history," recounts Mouzannar. "After the Covid crisis and the tragedy of Aug. 4, everyone was leaving, and I absolutely wanted to prove that we could still experience beautiful things in this country."
The beautiful things begin at this year’s edition on July 30 with a soft universe carried by the ethereal and clear voice of singer Tania Saleh. A timbre she puts at the service of committed lyrics that walk a fine line.
Tania Saleh, exile in chiaroscuro
With Cuban, Egyptian "bossa nova," alternative rock and other influences, Tania Saleh explores scales without ever failing the heritage of Arabic song. It’s a genre she now questions with a critical sense.
Saleh is an authentic artist, a complete personality, who after a long career in advertising decided to "tear herself away" from her country to be fully able to devote herself to her art. In 2022, she packed her suitcase with only the essentials and moved to France, where she found the support she needed to complete her projects — musical, pictorial or otherwise — aware that she couldn't tour forever.
That suitcase contains all the fragility of this forced exile. The pitfalls she encounters in her host country. Those of Lebanon, beset by crises and conflicts, in a region in perpetual turmoil, in a troubled world. She recognizes in the eyes of others — from various backgrounds — the same feeling of uprootedness, of losing bearings in a world governed by machines.
Through her music, she seeks to express this shared condition, marked by technological dependency and the fear of total collapse, the result of a system dominated by wealth, violence, and the erosion of the living world. Naturally her seventh studio album is titled "Fragile," like the label you stick on a suitcase that must be handled with care…
An album she will present at this concert to the Lebanese audience, where she will be joined on stage by Mouzannar to perform songs from Labaki’s films, in which she is the main lyricist. Since she left, this is the very first concert Saleh has given in her country. To accompany the show, ten paintings created by this versatile artist herself, illustrating her latest album, will be exhibited in an annex of the citadel that Mouzannar plans to transform into a cultural center.
Reviving a place through art
"One of the guiding threads of this festival is these stories of friendship and musical and artistic affinities, and who better than Tania, who is a great friend, to embody that," says Mouzannar, who met Saleh at 18 in Ziad Rahbani’s studio while working on his first demos as she was recording her debut album. He fell under the spell of her voice and poetry.
"For me, she is one of the greatest lyricists in Oriental song," says Mouzannar, who regrets the mutation of the music industry, which has become a machine that crushes talent.
This first concert will be followed on Aug.1 and 2 by two tango concerts: "Tango Bajo El Cedro" with Daniel Melingo, Argentinian musician, singer-songwriter and actor, who charmed Mouzannar and Labaki during a concert in France.
His musical universe deeply moved Mouzannar, who grew up with Latin American sounds thanks to his mother. For him, tango represents the point of convergence between this continent and the Mediterranean. "Astor Piazzolla changed my life and my way of seeing traditional folk music transformed into 'serious' music. I also like the type of song from Nick Cave and Tom Waits, those storytellers, and in Daniel Melingo I found the perfect mix of these two worlds," he told L’Orient-Le Jour.
As for the closing concert-dinner Sacred Bach & Eastern Mystics on Aug. 3, it takes place in the cellars of the Ixsir estate with the sound of Bach, which "is a language that speaks to the brain, the heart and the soul," along with three kinds of music the host musician loves: Byzantine, Sufi and Syriac. He wants to see these "married rather than confronted." It is a kind of spiritual musical dialogue, with singer Lynn Adib, Tania Sonc (first violin), Ribal Molaeb (viola) and Clara Germont (cello).
Mouzannar, who lives close to nature in this region of near food self-sufficiency, aims to introduce this terroir to as many foreign and local musicians as possible, reminding us, as he says, that "happiness is in the field."
Nehna el-jil el-jadid ma fi chi tale’ bi idou… "We are this new powerless generation," sang Saleh at her beginnings. Let’s hope she’s wrong.
*The concerts will precede with wine tastings and followed by a buffet of local delicacies. Doors open at 7:30 p.m., concert at 8:30 p.m. Tickets on sale at Virgin Ticketing.
This article was originally published in French by L'Orient-le Jour.
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