Stellenberg Girls' Choir in Halberstadt © INTERKULTUR

Benefit Concert in Halberstadt

Stellenberg Girls Choir meets Rundfunk-Jugendchor Wernigerode

Johannes Brahms Int. Choir Festival & Competition

What is music? Is it a line-up of tones? In some centuries, it was normal not to have a rhythm written down and just sing the notes freely. Or is it the rhythm more important? Think of a percussion piece that can make people dance right away. Is it the combination of both? Or is it something completely different? If you ask me, music is what people feel as music. Every continent, every culture, even every individual has its own music.

Last night, I had the privilege to be part of the benefit concert in the cathedral of Halberstadt with a South African and a German youth choir. When the Stellenberg Girls‘ Choir (Republic of South Africa) walked up on stage, you could see a lot of surprised and some perplexed faces in the audience. To see the girls in relaxed black dresses with face paint patterns and sticks in their hair – an unprecedented event in the old cathedral. Nevertheless, when the choir started singing, the atmosphere changed. The unmistakably African sounds picked up the cathedral and carried it away to the far side of our neighbor continent. Suddenly, the combination of choir and room did not seem strange anymore.

“You say that often, girls’ choirs miss the male voices. That’s not the case with Stellenberg. They have the stability, they have the base and that’s why they have connection to the ground even though they can fly”, states Peter Habermann (international juror and director of the Rundfunk-Jugendchor Wernigerode). Apart from presenting “their own” music, the ensemble under the baton of André van der Merwe proved their variability with pieces like Ave Maria by Sergei Khvoschinsky. And with “Mongolian Horses” by Se Enkhbayar the group left a shaking church and audience.

After an organ interlude by Claus Erhard Heinrich which helped relax the atmosphere and gave everyone a little time to breath, the Rundfunk-Jugendchor Wernigerode (Radio Youth Choir Wernigerode) delivered a very contrasted program that ranged from German folksongs to Josu Elberdin Badiolas contemporary “Cantate Domino”.

Special for this concert was that every singer was there voluntarily. For a school choir, that is not a normal thing, but the past year was successful enough for a lot of students to confirm their participation in this concert and the rehearsals, respectively. Happening after the end of the school year, the project also had a special position as the very last one with the youngest graduates of our school who will now leave the choir. Maybe that also suggests that, although you cannot always infer it from their faces, all singers had an emotional association with the concert as a whole. Some songs even went better than ever before – a Grand Goodbye for our alumni, including me as well.

In general, you could say it will always be hard for a German ensemble to perform after the strength of expression of a South African one has filled the stage. But the complete style difference between the choirs made it possible for both to fascinate the audience and to create not only atmosphere, but a world of feelings in the cathedral.

What is music? The two youth choirs showed there are different answers to that question. It depends on who you are and where you come from. That is what makes music so special. That is what makes it so difficult. That is what makes it exciting.

(Lucas Waclawczyk)

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