The last time I heard so much excitement was when the Sharks beat the Blue Bulls in Durban in 2008. I wasn't at the stadium that Saturday night in October – but you could hear the roar all the way from Morningside to the beachfront.
The last time I heard so much excitement was when the Sharks beat the Blue Bulls in Durban in 2008. I wasn't at the stadium that Saturday night in October – but you could hear the roar all the way from Morningside to the beachfront.
The Drakensberg Boys Choir sang in the Monument on Wednesday night – their first time in Grahamstown in 13 years. It all started in a way you’d pretty much expect from the famous Champagne Valley institution: Fifty highly disciplined boys in restrained pale-blue suits with white front-frills. Two hours from Durban and a world of difference from the Absa stadium.
A South African traditional song Siyakudumisa to lead the choir in, then straight into the Hallelujah Chorus. The two hours a day of rehearsal that form part of the boys’ daily school programme showed in their vocal control, spot-on intonation, utter focus and discipline down to the last facial muscle.
“He, Watching Over Israel, Slumbers Not, Nor Sleeps” from Mendelssohn's Elijah follows. Yes these boys are good, and these icons of choral repertoire are everything you’d expect from a choir school – but somehow it feels a bit bleak. You really need mature voices to carry those “big” works.
A careful transition to more contemporary sacred works in the form of a gentle gospel worship song introduced Stefan Marais as the main vocal soloist for the evening.
The boys’ voices come into their own in contemporary Hungarian composer György Orbán’s Spring song, Mundi Renovatio, which requires strong formal musical training: it doesn’t “sing itself” and requires vocal agility. They have it.
But the concert really started for the mostly school-going audience with Sean Kingston’s Beautiful Girls – and from then onwards the applause crescendoed.
The boys had donned colourful traditional outfits for the second-half programme of folk music from South Africa and around the world. An atmospheric Swedish summer hymn opened with a rich bass hum, punctuated by bird and insect sounds created by the boys. And from an Austrian shoe-tap dance – “No, it’s not gumboot-dancing gone wrong,” assured conductor Johann van der Sandt – they kept up the pace through songs from origins as diverse as Haiti and the Cape Flats.
The Cape Carnival song Hiep Hiep Hoera, Suid Afrika saw the boys mingle with the audience, getting them up on their feet. By then they were ready for a thrilling display of massed gumboot dancing.
First a team of four boys did a set including standards such as Attention! and Samurai, getting just the right mix between exaggerated clowning, and rhythmic precision and complexity. Then, to see and hear, perfectly synchronised, 50 pairs of white gumboots rising up and coming down as one on the stage was awe-inspiring.
The audience spoke in applause that lifted the roof of the packed Guy Butler auditorium: the Drakensberg Boys Choir had won convincingly.
What did they beat? Apathy. Cynicism about South Africa. Mediocrity. No prisoners taken.
The Drakensberg Boys Choir leave to conquer Europe on 9 December.
A sporting case for choirboys
Filled with national pride as we should be by our prowess in both rugby and singing – who would ever appoint a choirboy to captain the national team? That’s exactly the question well-read blogger Norman Lebrecht – a British author and cultural commentator, asks (http://bit.ly/OBQq1T).
“England, for one. Our new cricket captain, Alastair Cook, sang in the choir of St Paul’s Cathedral and won a scholarship to the associated school,” Lebrecht writes.
“While there, unfortunately, he discovered a greater passion for cricket than for singing and was forever leaving the trebles one short while he scored a century on the rolling lawns.”
And former England rugby captain Laurence Dallaglio, someone writes in response, is in the King’s House School boys choir that appears on the backing track to Tina Turner’s We Don’t Need Another Hero.
Famous former Drakensberg Boys Choir alumni include the Bala Brothers, Jacques Imbrailo, Nicholas Nicolaides and Rory Rootenberg.
