Within the auditorium of Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace, buried deep beneath the 7-star luxury hotel’s many layers of opulence — past the $500-an-hour Maybach rental fleet, a gold-dispensing ATM, and swarms of oversized Swarovski crystal chandeliers — a crowd is poised to cheer on a composer responsible for some of the world’s biggest pop records of the past 20 years wraps up a track from one of his solo piano albums. The artist, sitting ramrod-straight at his piano, flips a page and welcomes a young American singer to join him on stage to perform one of his far more popular creations.
The confluence represents an aggressive pivot for Abu Dhabi Classics, a concert series renewed in 2014 with the aim of establishing the United Arab Emirates capital as a musical epicenter. Many of the world’s top classical musicians, orchestras, and conductors have passed through the series, which runs annually from October to May with a fresh theme each season. Here, for the first time, Classics is dipping its toe into pop music waters. The audience, accustomed to settling into their seats for the subdued artistry of French piano prodigies and mandolin-backed Syrian poets, appears pleased and engaged when the composer tells the dramatic story of how he conceived of the track, Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball.”
Stephan Moccio, the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated composer and pianist occupying the bench, has enjoyed the maximum amount of success the music industry allows its members without ambushing them with the burden of stifling celebrity. And he’s spent the past three days in Abu Dhabi regaling crowds with the songs and stories he’s developed along the way: How he composed the theme for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, which ranks as the second most famous piece of music in his native Canada’s history (trailing only its national anthem); How he pieced together “Earned It” for a young Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, whom the world would eventually know as The Weeknd.
Or, the request from a man named “Bob” to perform a private concert for his family — the Redford family, as in Robert; the time he told Celine Dion, as a precocious 18-year-old, that he’d one day write her a song, and then resurrected her career with a 26-week #1 hit ten years later. John Legend and Fergie also get name-dropped, as do Miley Cyrus and Beyonce in the “Wrecking Ball” origin story.
Those experiences have culminated in this week’s trip to the Middle East, his first, and he’s not shy about singing the area’s praises. “I feel connected to this environment. I feel connected to the sky, to this earth, to the desert,” he told an intimate gathering of local dignitaries two nights earlier, during a private recital within the walls of a 19th century open-aired desert fortress rich in Abu Dhabi history. “I like the deafening sounds of silence of the desert.” This isn’t lip service, as Moccio’s Instagram feed is quickly filling up with photos and videos of him frolicking in the rolling sand dunes.
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“If there was one person that I wanted to work with and collaborate with, it was him,” Stephanie Carcache told me the evening before joining Moccio on stage for “Wrecking Ball.” The Miami-born singer has been performing professionally since she was 13, and felt her career falling into a rut before Moccio hand-picked her for Classics after meeting in Los Angeles. “He just plain out asked me if I wanted to join him and I was like, ‘Really? Me?’”
The break couldn’t have come at a better time for Carcache, whose disillusionment with the LA scene led her to Moccio’s music long before they’d met.
“In Hollywood, I feel like music is so much not alive there, and I was searching for music to make me feel something and I came across ‘Real Life’ by The Weeknd and I just started crying,” she told Uproxx. “I was like, ‘Wow, this moved me.’ So I Googled and I was like ‘Who did this song? Because that’s a person I would love to work with.’ That led me to his solo piano work, and I was just blown away. Chills, tears, completely moved.”
The classically-trained Moccio fits snugly within the Abu Dhabi Classics mission of importing an appreciation of classical music into the area. His pop proficiency, paired with performing talent like Carcache, provides the series a seamless side door through which to sneak some modernity. Given the worldly creativity of the series’ leadership, this is no accident.
Classics is helmed by Dr. Ronald Perlwitz, a German academic who entered Abu Dhabi in 2006 by way of Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, lecturing on romantic literature at the French institution. Perlwitz, fluent in five languages including Sanskrit and Hindi, took on the challenge of teaching literature in an area where culture has been trafficked less via recorded history and more through oral tradition. Five years later, the campus executive director credited Perlwitz with “developing the business and languages department with great success.”
Now he’s aiming to takes the arts in Abu Dhabi even higher.
“We really want to create world-class events,” says Perlwitz. “We believe that in Abu Dhabi we can have a musical life that is as good as anything in London, Paris, and New York.” He’s taking his big swing by booking world class acts and leveraging the emirate’s many historical and modern structural marvels.
He’s also fanning the flames of a new generation, giving local students a behind-the-scenes look at rehearsals, bringing artists to the school, and training teachers in classical music. “We’re not a simple festival,” he tells Abu Dhabi World. “We want to educate people, we want to create an awareness and an appreciation of classical music.”
The program also provides a new level of exposure for artists like Carcache, whether they admit it or not. Pressed to describe what she wants to get out of the performance, Carcache repeatedly deflected, emanating a duty to give rather than receive. “I just want to give love,” she said. “When I step out I just want to exude love. Stephan’s music, he has very dramatic melodies but they also contain a story. So I hope that through love and through his melodies I can deliver the message he intended.”
If the immediate reaction was any indication, Carcache achieved her goal. The FAQ page on the Abu Dhabi Music website has a section for concertgoers wondering “When should I applaud?” Part of the answer is mind-numbingly obvious (“On a general basis, musicians love applause”) while others go, at least on this night, disregarded. The site paints applause during an ongoing performance as a “perceived disturbance,” but the crowd breaks into claps and shouts several times during the “Wrecking Ball” performance.
Clearly, Carcache didn’t seem to mind. If anything, the applause confirmed her mission of giving love as accomplished — and reciprocated. “At the end of it all I received so much more than I could have ever imagined,” Carcache said, looking back on the performance. “Love filled the room that night.”
