Young choristers make the music speak

Tonight, Auckland hosts the New Zealand Youth Choir on the eve of its upcoming tour to Australia, Singapore, South Korea and China, where it performs in the New Zealand Pavilion at the Shanghai Expo.

Artistic director Karen Grylls should be justifiably proud of the diversity and range of music that her 46-strong choir will be singing.

And talk about the "music of today" - apart from one 17th century motet, a good proportion of tonight's pieces date from the last few decades. The NZYC is not a choir which stands still.

Anyone who caught last year's Baradene concert will remember all the ingenious re-positionings of personnel from piece to piece. One of the most effective, Grete Pedersen's Jesus gjor med stille, with the young singers scattered throughout the auditorium, is also on tonight's bill.

"These days it's not just a matter of standing in rows and singing," Grylls stresses.

"Nor should we be heading towards show choralography. We need to understand the drama of the text and present the works accordingly."

Another Scandinavian piece, I Himmelen by the Swedish Karin Rehnqvist, "mixes a folkish sort of melody with singers employing the same technique that might be used if you were outdoors calling cows" and Grylls admits a special fondness for its "interaction between the traditional and rustic".

Giles Swayne's Magnificat is singled out as "very exciting with its mixture of African calls to prayer and the hocket-like effect of the Magnificat being passed between two choirs".

The fact that Swayne's demanding score could be added to the choir's repertoire is due to the success of a recent residential course in Christchurch, six days which provided "the sort of environment where we could really focus, come together as a group and make some positive achievements".

For almost a week, the singers did not have to worry about returning home after a rehearsal and the distractions of the internet were kept to a minimum, which allowed time and space for valuable explorations.

"We did a lot of bubble blowing, to gauge the rate of breath and its connection with the body," Grylls tells me.

"We found that intonation settled down when breathing and all that stuff was regular. We externalised it so they could see the rate of breath through the bubbles."

Grylls likes to pepper her comments with the language of her young choristers. "Cool" is a frequent epithet of approbation and she will cheerfully talk of the young men and women "strutting their stuff". Yet she is deadly serious when she worries whether people really value the level of excellence.

"It really bothers me," she says, likening the required commitment from a chorister to Bill Gates' single-minded devotion to the world of computers.

"He got his first computer at the age of 8 and by the time he was 15 he had used them for 10,000 hours.

"Recently, a young Canadian singer with choral experience told me there were probably only 15 per cent of singers willing to work massively and invest all their effort for the result. The next 30 per cent would not want to work quite that hard but would do their best. The rest just wanted a bit of a sampling. The challenge for me is balancing all those levels of commitment.

"We've got to create the culture we want to work in. In this day of quick fixes and instant gratification, the young singers have to understand that time invested will equip them with the skills needed to make the music speak. It's always a big challenge and always has been."

A challenge which, no doubt, will be gloriously met in tonight's concert.

And, with free admission, thanks to the generosity of the choir's sponsors, there is little excuse for missing it.

PERFORMANCE

What: New Zealand Youth Choir

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tonight at 7.30pm