What: New Zealand National Youth Choir.
Where and when: Baradene College, 237 Victoria Ave, Remuera, tonight at 7.30pm.
No doubt about it, Karen Grylls is in the same league as the Graham Henrys, Stephen Kearneys and Lois Muirs of our world. Grylls' team, the New Zealand National Youth Choir, is 51 voices strong and tonight it celebrates its 30th anniversary not on a sports field or in a stadium, but in the more expected concert hall.
This woman can rouse and inspire like the best of our sports coaches. "There's nothing that replaces singing together," she says. "And, you know, there's a lot of acknowledgement that singing is a really healthy activity," she adds, making me feel I should slink off to a choir practice.
But we're not talking about chasing a ball or circling a racetrack. "I'm inviting the singers into the worlds of these composers to see what the music is trying to say. Then they can understand what their part is in portraying and communicating that."
Grylls' clear-eyed approach has served the young musicians well during the two decades she has been at the helm. Numerous overseas tours have seen them bring home international prizes and honours - most recently, two years ago, from Spain and Wales. They are also expected to sing in everything from Estonian and Welsh to Spanish and Samoan.
She really worked to get her singers engaging with their presentation of Jubiaba by the Brazilian composer Carlos Fonseca. "This is about the adoration of a great priestess and it's dramatic," she stresses. "It's a very cool piece." On the other hand, reining in the intensity, she describes an arrangement of a Welsh folk-song as having "that unbelievably still quality of sheer beauty".
Grylls is aware of the pressures on her charges, some of which come from today's "smorgasbord mentality - look along the table of life and try a little bit of this and a little bit of that".
Nevertheless, she is no fan of the warm fuzzies that come from the easy communal ambience of the choral experience. She winces at overseas youth choirs flaunting their "gymnastical brilliance with contemporary music"; for her, a sustained bel canto line means more.
American colleagues are amazed she sustains the young people's interest with so much unaccompanied a cappella work but it is simply "the best way to train and the best way to listen".
"This is why I embrace so many different languages and genres," she adds. "The minute you get into another language you embrace another world."
Grylls has always been a good and loyal friend of the New Zealand composer, taking our music all around the globe. At the moment she is excited about Matariki, a new work by Auckland composer David Hamilton. It is accompanied by two pianos and "little bells that imitate the sparkling of the stars. And I like the way he uses the Maori text".
She admits that overseas we are known for our Maori and Pacific music but now finds some of the self-conscious bicultural repertoire of the 70s and 80s a little dated. "Douglas Mews' Love Song of Rangipouri starts off by quoting a waiata almost in its entirety and then the rest of the piece sounds like it's from another planet."
Today, young composers like Sarah McCallum are more eclectic, but Grylls asks how she might convince an overseas audience that McCallum's The Moon's glow once lit is a picture of someone sitting on a North Shore beach looking out at the islands?
"How do you work out what the trees are, what the light's like? If it's different, how is it different?"
Tonight's concert may well provide something towards an answer, when the choir delivers its New Zealand works, including a bracket of popular waiata, alongside music from as far afield as Norway, Russia and Brazil - a true United Nations of song.
