NZ Youth Choir at Baradene College

By WILLIAM DART

Sunday's farewell concert by the Tower New Zealand Youth Choir could well be an emotional one; the next day, its 48 singers leave on their seventh international tour, a month of travelling and giving concerts in Singapore, Slovenia, Hungary, Italy and Russia.

Karen Grylls has long been one of this country's musical treasures and has conducted the choir for most of its 25 years. This woman has the tenacity and quickfire personality of a top sports coach.

Such comparisons are not wilful. Over the years, the choir has been returning home after victories that would earn sportsmen a ticker-tape parade down Queen St. Carrying off the 1999 Choir of the Year award in Llangollen was just one.

The very act of singing has always had an extraordinary appeal for Grylls.

"It's the fact that the emotion of the instrument comes from the body, from the being," she says, "and that's really deep. The emotion of an instrument always has to come through something, but there isn't anything between the singer and the audience and that's what hits people."

The diversity of the choral scene in this country continues to amaze and Grylls agrees that "one of the best things that has happened here is that we have embraced so many musical styles".

Yet, for this conductor, it is still the essential mix of Polynesian and Pakeha that provides the core, "blending the emotional and performing side of the music of the Maori and different Pacific nations into the intellectual tradition of the West".

You'll be able to experience this on Sunday when the choir rounds off its concert with I Te Timatanga by Wehi Whanau. "We do kapa haka and poi, the whole thing," enthuses Grylls. "It's something I've been building into the repertoire for years. The only problem is that it tires you out so you can't do anything after it."

Sunday's programme also includes some of the "slightly zany composers" Grylls finds herself drawn to, Estonians such as Urmas Sisask and Veljo Tormis, who is represented by a powerful work for male voices and gong.

As the choir is expected to sing Russian music in Russia, they have chosen scores by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov where Grylls describes the challenge as "getting as dark a sound as we can in music that is massively legato ... It's physiology, too. Our guys probably don't drink as much vodka or smoke as much as the guys who sing those real basses."

On the New Zealand side, there will be a couple of Rain Songs from Auckland composer David Hamilton, settings of American Indian texts which "mix a slow-moving chordal texture against a more bristling component. People can quickly hook into this even though it's difficult to sing. This is music that really does speak to people."

There are some magnificent samplings of local composers on the choir's CDs, especially its 1999 Winds that Whisper with works like Douglas Mews' Love Song of Rangipouri, David Hamilton's The Moon is Silently Singing and Jenny McLeod's uproarious Childhood.

It's the "mercurial musical textures" of Childhood that Grylls adores and she singles out Mews' Love Song as being "one of the first initiatives to bring together the Maori and European musical traditions". Both will be included in a special presentation of New Zealand music arranged and sponsored by the Slovenian Government.

We could not have more eloquent ambassadors than Grylls and her 48 voices. "The countries we are visiting know that singing makes bridges politically, socially and in every other way," Grylls points out. "That's the power of music. And we don't always recognise that here, or that this choir is making important connections."