Stephen Gray
This is the cultural item I had been told not to miss. They had said: “Stay at the Nest Mountain Resort hotel in the Central Berg. Their staff will get you there on time, along the remaining 7km up the Champagne Valley. There the Drakensberg Boys’ Choir School has its own auditorium and all. Spectacular setting. Worth a hearing.”
That world-famous Boys’ Choir gives weekly concerts, I was told that is, when they are not on tour (recently Scandinavia, this time to Japan). There all comers are welcome to hear new work in the repertoire or to catch up on old favourites.
But obstinate resistance kept me away, stuck to the R74 throughroad at Winterton. I never turned off towards the Nest, which by the way serves some of the best menus in all of South Africa. That is, if you can eat after gasping across the montane flora at the bulky panorama outside of the dining room. Call it the Barrier of Spears, the Malutis, the pile-up of a whole vast continent.
I guess it was the concept of some local blond sprite in a dinky uniform pitching Mozart’s Queen of the Night to a plodding piano (as, mark you, they used to do) that kept me miles away. If they had rallied on a mass Jingle Bells, which they still do occasionally at boy-kitsch fund-raisers, I’d have been the first to leave. Nor am I ready for the Angel Choir just yet.
So I was woefully unprepared for the astounding spectacles they put on as the centrepieces of the now annual Music in the Mountains festival in April. Others were joining in manfully, each to equally packed houses: Danile Pascal, Coenie de Villiers and the gorgeously friendly, richly throated Laurika Rauch.
But the lads in their blue waistcoats and curly bibs were on their own grounds, after all. They knew it was for them we had trekked like pioneers of old, over the foothills to outspan beneath their temple almost in homage to one of our national treasures and a pretty unique attraction in the world, I should say.
For a start they were nothing like the tippytoed freaks I feared. On clattered the dozens of kwedins in Afrogeometric costumes. They do numbers from the archives like Ntsikana’s Bell, calling up the valley; they do sugar-slashing work songs and Rock around the Clock and they crash into mass gumboot dances. The hadedahs taking off outside seem just right, too.
They do stick-fighting; they do wedding songs and Edward Elgar and night sounds on gourds, as their piping voices rise into a rainbow-coloured light show with shattering smoke effects. In short, nowadays those pupils (grades 3 to 7) get the kind of all-round African education we all wish we had had.
To celebrate their 35th anniversary, Christian Ashley-Botha launched his Drakensberg Oratorio, a major work custom-made for them. It was in the tradition of Igor Stravinsky’s Les Noces (the choir central, with keyboards in the rhythm section) and of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana (a huge battery of precision percussion) both driving and uplifting, it was well-suited for the gala occasion.
Ashley-Botha conducted his own work, with the tact and enjoyment all the choir directors used for their various sections. It proved the perfect showcase: the kiddies got their chance to soar, the rest to speak, chant, rave en masse, strike xylophones. They carried scores just in case but, as with everything else they perform, you knew they need not. They knew it all by heart.
Those boy sopranos soared like eagles, before the altos they soon enough sink to becoming. And then when the moustaches start, they turn into the tenors and baritones, when it’s just about amen to such a dizzy career in vocalisation. And what moved me most of all was when figures in the auditorium jumped up nostalgic old Drakies having to join in. What a privileged youth they all experience, to make music their communal joy. And to share it with us, the none so privileged.
The details
For more information on future events call (036) 468 1012 or e-mail concerts @dbchoir.co.za. The choir also performs every Wednesday at 3.30pm in the Drakensberg Auditorium