Released next Friday on Warner Classics, Egyptian soprano Fatma Said's second solo album for the label is every bit as eclectic and distinctive as her award-winning debut recording El Nour - taking dance as its inspiration, the programme features operatic waltzes by Massenet, Gounod and Lehár, tangos by Piazzolla, Gardel and Weill, and even a bespoke arrangement of George Merrill's 'I Wanna Dance with Somebody' (made famous by the late, great Whitney Houston in the late 1980s).

Over Zoom last week, Fatma told me about taking her first steps in ballroom as a teenager in Cairo, seizing any opportunity to grab her dancing-shoes whenever her busy performing schedule permits, the parallels between Argentinian tango and classical singing, and two very different divas who inspired her programming on the new album...

How did your passion for dance begin, and how much formal training have you had?

I always did hip-hop at school in Cairo, but then my parents started taking ballroom-dancing lessons, and one day they took me along with them…I was fascinated by the foxtrot, waltzes and standard tango, and I absolutely loved partner dance – the idea of dancing with someone else was a completely new concept for me.

Then as a birthday-present my parents bought me a whole package, so I started training properly at the age of fifteen, and did it until I left Cairo about three years later: we had the Arthur Murray franchise in Cairo, and that’s where I learned all the standard ballroom dances. I’ve always been into Latin American music, so a bit later on I learned to dance the rumba, the cha-cha-cha, the samba, the mambo. Salsa was really my thing, and I still love going to salsa clubs!

My journey with Argentinian tango started about six years ago in Milan, and whenever I have some down-time to dedicate to hobbies that’s what I focus on. It’s so easy – you just grab your dance-shoes, head down to the milonga and just dance with random tangueros. It’s a whole culture!

From a technical point of view, how much does your dance training feed into your singing?

The posture of tango is very similar to the posture of singing. My tango teacher has a lot of interesting things to say about how we should breathe, and it’s so closely related to how we should sing. Tango is also something that requires breath control in order to be able to execute all the moves – it’s important not to just tense up and stop breathing dynamically.

And both singing and tango require you to strike a balance between being essentially relaxed but still keeping some intensity in your body so that you don’t let loose completely. Singers have to make sure that the ribcage stays intact while we are breathing out rather than collapsing, and it’s the same thing with the tango: you have to keep the breath-flow going whilst maintaining that classic tango posture.

How did the idea of theming an album around dance develop, and what's the significance of the title?

When I started thinking about this album I knew that I wanted to focus on something that felt authentic and personal to me; El Nour, my first album, was very much about my cultural background and who I am, and I wanted this one to be equally conceptual. Having dance as the common thread gave me all sorts of opportunities to be creative, and supplied what I like to think of as the ‘Fatma Edge’!

And focusing on dance meant I could showcase all the other styles that I’m able to sing, rather than just limiting it to classical and recording another typical opera arias album: OK, in opera we have waltzes and so on, and I’ve included some of those, but I wanted to present audiences with a different side of me too. I didn’t grow up singing and listening to classical music - I grew up singing musicals, pop music, Arab music, and it was important for the album to reflect that.

Hence the title Kaleidoscope: I loved the idea of the same singer turning herself like a chameleon every time she sings a song. That's much more about vocal adaptation rather than just character adaptation: from a technical point of view I enjoyed figuring out how to manipulate the voice to fit the colour of a song exactly and make it sound like another person whilst still using the larynx in a healthy way. And that goes beyond just using a different sound for the opera repertoire than I do for the pop and jazz stuff: it was equally important to me to bring out the contrasts between Manon and Juliette, and to show that even the individual opera arias have very different colours.

Although of course there are lots of waltzes and tangos on the album, I also wanted to be clear that it isn’t only about dance in in the sense of physical movement. I strongly believe that sometimes when you hear music you dance from the inside – your heart can be dancing when you’re sitting perfectly still in a concert!

You commissioned the Egyptian songwriter Tamer Hussein to write new lyrics in Arabic to Villoldo’s tango ‘El Choclo' - what sort of brief did you give him for that?

A secondary theme on the album is women as their own story-tellers, and that’s something that we see in the operas, in the musicals, in the films, in the texts of the jazz and pop songs… When I was putting my selection together, I realised that each of these women has a different tale to tell – and they’re all about love.

But when I had the chance to commission these new words, I didn’t want to make it into another love-song: I wanted to make it about a woman who's struggling. As an Arab woman and an Egyptian woman, I’m very much pro female independence in the Arab world, and I hope that this song ‘Ad Ay Sa’ab’ (‘I’m up to any challenge’) inspires as many women as possible rather than only speaking to a specific type of woman. I want a little girl at school to listen to it and find it inspirational during her exams, or a university student preparing for graduation, or an older woman going through challenges with her mental health or marriage or career. I hope that it has something to say to all of us: that was my goal.

Was all of the music on the programme in your repertoire already?

No, not much! 'I could have danced all night’ from My Fair Lady is something that’s accompanied me forever - I have a video of me singing that when I was 15! And of course I’d sung the classical stuff like Juliette and Manon and Giulietta in concerts before, but so many things were new discoveries: the Bolero from Messager’s La Fiancée en Loterie, for instance, which I thought was a nice thing to include rather than any of the more famous boleros we get in opera.

Friedrich Schröder’s ‘Ich tanze mit dir in den Himmel hinein’ [from the 1937 German screwball comedy Sieben Ohrfeigen] was a suggestion from my teacher, who introduced me to it when I was telling him about my ideas for the album, and I liked it a lot because it’s rather unknown: I was so happy to bring it back to life! Piazzolla’s 'Yo soy María' and ‘Oblivion’ and Gainsbourg’s 'La Javanaise' were all new to me too.

Joaquín Nin’s Minué cantado is something I’ve wanted to record for years: I got to know it through a Victoria de los Ángeles recording, and I fell completely in love with her voice and her interpretation.

Speaking of an iconic voice and interpretation, the Whitney Houston cover which closes the album was a real surprise! How daunting was it to make that song your own, given how strongly it's associated with her?

I’d never seriously tried to sing that before, and it was only possible to include it because we had this wonderful arrangement that helped me explore it in my own voice. I’d be very stupid to think I could compare my style to Whitney’s - she’s the absolute goddess! I listened to her constantly when I was growing up in Egypt: she was one of the divas I admired most during my teenage years, along with Mariah Carey, Deborah Cox, Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald.

Is your 2022/23 season as eclectic as the new album?!

I’m Artist in Residence at the Konzerthaus Berlin, so I’m really excited about my next season – and yes, that’s going to be kind of kaleidoscopic too! I’ll be doing some recitals with Sabine Meyer and Malcolm Martineau, Strauss and Dvořák orchestral songs with Iván Fischer, an Egyptian-themed concert including Egyptian music commissioned for me, and a programme of classical music with a boy-band!

Apart from Berlin, I’ll be at Wigmore Hall, in Barcelona at the Victoria de los Ángeles Festival, and singing Vitellia in La clemenza di Tito on a tour (with Cecilia Bartoli as Sesto). There’s also a lovely baroque project with Concerti de' Cavalieri, and to round off the year I’m performing in Christmas concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg with Daniel Hope.