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21 November 2011
While nothing has quite rivalled Chamber Music New Zealand's calling on jazz pianist Thelonious Monk to tour the country in 1965, its traditional line-ups of string quartets and piano trios have always been punctuated with everything from Korean ensembles and wind quintets to chamber choirs.
The grand finale to this year's season has been entrusted to Karen Grylls and her Voices New Zealand choir. When I catch up with her, Grylls is still reacclimatising after their participation in the World Choral Symposium in Patagonia three months ago.
"We ended up representing Australasia," she says. "We took along Horomona Horo with his taonga puoro and our job was to share the music of our land and who we are. And a portion of Monday's concert reflects what we did over there, so New Zealanders will get the chance to hear the best of what we offered."
Not all the challenges in South America were musical. One was "the Chilean volcano which kept dumping its ash and forcing us to take lots of long bus trips", Grylls laughs. "And we'd have liked a bit more time in Buenos Aires which was in the middle of big elections."
She also had an enticing taste of the choral traditions of a new continent. "Many of them presented song and dance. It was more folk-like than the sacred music that other choirs were coming up with and it was wonderful to experience the energy as well as the colours of both the music and the language."
Grylls stresses that she doesn't want Voices New Zealand to be known as a choir that only does New Zealand music; she takes a special delight in describing the vivid word-painting of Morton Lauridsen's Madrigaliand Benjamin Britten's Five Flower Songs, where "you can almost see the slimy roots in the sinewy harmonies of the Marsh Flowers".
Yet the South Pacific is an inescapable presence in Monday's programme, with works by Christopher Marshall, David Griffiths and Douglas Mews' classic Ghosts Fire Water, a "statement on Hiroshima that each generation can take on themselves for whatever they understand their war, battle or struggle to be".
Expect magic when the evening opens with Horo playing his taonga puoro while the choir sing Hildegard of Bingen's O viridissima virga.
"Each music finds its source in a chant," Grylls explains, "but putting them together is tricky. The Hildegard was notated, back in the 12th century, but Horo's music is totally improvised.
We're learning to work together, with a lot of pitch bending and shifting around."
Their collaboration is a process.
"It goes back to 1993 when we sat in the same room as Bub Wehi and her Te Waka Huia singers at Sing Aotearoa and simply sang to each other. What Voices is doing now comes at the end of a 17 or 18-year journey."
Horo has taken his music around the world, playing with both the Weimar Staatskapelle Orchestra and at the 90th anniversary commemorations of the Battle of Passchendaele.
On the lighter side, he has toured with Moana and the Moahunters and this year was part of Charlotte Yates' Auckland Arts Festival production of Ihimaera.
Grylls is musically smitten. "Horomona talks so beautifully about the voices of his instruments," she says. "He's in Helen Fisher's Pounamu as well as David Hamilton's new Karakia of the Stars which has a part specially written for him.
"We have the same respect, passion and sensitivity to the music that we bring together. We don't claim to have the answers yet, but we're on a journey. Having someone like David Hamilton write something for the two worlds, as it were, is both a challenge and a risk and it's got to be done."