(South African National Youth Orchestra. Photo by Jozua Loots)Youthful energy enlivens our music scene. (by William Charlton-Perkins, courtesy of The Mercury)
Chatting over lunch in Durban recently with Sonya Welz, director of the South African National Youth Orchestra, I encountered a remarkable combination of positive energy and practical savvy. While the latter characteristic is common to many musicians I’ve known over the years (Welz is a bassoonist), the former attribute, clearly, is a prerequisite for an arts organisation that operates from a nomadic, project-based ‘virtual’ office, while relying heavily on the goodwill and help of volunteers for the youth orchestra to function smoothly.
Neither of these challenges fazes Welz, nor her able and multi-functional factotum, Jozua Loots, a young clarinettist with an administrative bent. They were in town on the KZN leg of their annual auditions trail, fielding hordes of contenders aged between 13 and 25 years, each eager to participate in the prestigious youth body’s tiered schedule of programmes.
Welz rattles off a dizzying line-up of events coming up: “On this year’s agenda, for the first time, is an opera, Purcell’s The Fairy Queen. This will be performed by players who were selected last year, as part of the Umculo Cape Festival in March and April, in Johannesburg and Cape Town.”
SANYO’s National Youth Brass course (for which players have also already been selected) runs from June 15 to 22 in Johannesburg, with a 12-piece ensemble led by Mark Hampson from the United Kingdom.
The Sasol National Youth Orchestra Course runs from June 22– July 1 in Johannesburg. This year’s National Youth Orchestra will be conducted by Christian Baldini, and the National Youth Concert Orchestra will be conducted by Scott Gabriel from Canada. South African Morkel Combrink will conduct the National Youth String Ensemble, and the National Youth Wind Orchestra Course and National Youth String Orchestra Course will run from December 6-16 in Cape Town.
And there’s more. “Our Winds Course, back by popular demand, will be conducted by Bjørn Breistein from Norway, and our first advanced Strings Course, for grade eights and up, is to be led by Fredrik Burstedt from Sweden. The players all get to flex their skills during these short, intensive programmes. Steep learning curves which generate lots of adrenalin, this is rigorous training for professional musicians in the making.”
By way of a sneak preview of next year’s programme, Welz reveals that acclaimed British maestro Sir Roger Norrington and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra with celebrated South African clarinettist Robert Pickup (a youth orchestra alumni) as soloist will perform in Johannesburg and Cape Town in January 2013. Select members of the NYO will be chosen to play with them.
Last year at the culmination of the Sasol National Youth Orchestra Course in Johannesburg, the NYO performed Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra with Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu as narrator. At that concert, the Archbishop said: “This just lifts your spirits. At a time when we seem to be pulling in different directions in our country, this is such a wonderful statement: young people of all races, playing in an orchestra, which itself is a symbol because it has different instruments. It is a wonderful image for our country.”
On another note, it’s great to hear a local music initiative has met with endorsement from no less an institute than the Juilliard School of Music. Christopher Duigan’s Music Revival was recently featured in a blog by arts journalist, Greg Sandow, a highly regarded and followed blogger on the future of classical music, who teaches at Julliard in New York.
“I am particularly amazed my musical goings-on in South Africa are of interest and value to him,” says Duigan. “It is exciting that he values my story, and has added this to his reading material for the course he teaches at Julliard.”
To read the story (and a great number of really interesting thoughts) visit http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2012/01/promoting-with-gusto.html. The Music Revival story is included under Sandow’s Julliard Course Work at http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2012/01/my-juilliard-course-updated.html and directly at http://www.gregsandow.com/popclass - William Charlton-Perkins
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