The young Egyptian soprano Fatma Said makes her recording debut for Warner Classics with El Nour. Her enticing programme crosses cultures, combining art songs by French, Spanish and Egyptian composers with Egyptian folk songs and popular songs from the Middle East.

As she explains, “‘El Nour’ in Arabic means ‘The Light’, and she intends the album to shed a different light on the music of three cultures – Arabic, French and Spanish – and to show just how much they have in common. Her partners on the album are pianist Malcolm Martineau, guitarist Rafael Aguirre and a jazz ensemble including traditional Middle Eastern instruments.

Praised for the luminosity and rich colours of her voice, Fatma Said studied in her native Cairo before training at Berlin’s Hanns Eisler School of Music and the Accademia del Teatro alla Scala in Milan. The winner of several high-profile singing competitions, she also spent two years on the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists scheme and has appeared on major operatic and concert stages around Europe and beyond.

“We worked for a really long time to devise a programme for El Nour that would appeal widely and also accord closely with my own musical tastes and loves,” she says. “The main idea is to convey a cross-cultural message to every audience in the world, to try to make classical music reachable and more accessible to cultures that are unfamiliar with classical music, and vice versa.”