Culduthel Christian Centre, Inverness, 3 December 2011

A CONCERT by a National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCoS) Area Choir is an impressive undertaking.

FOR one thing it’s not just one choir, but four, of widely ranging ages and abilities. To the untutored eye the Culduthel Christian Centre would appear to be populated by hundreds of children and young people in blue or black sweatshirts, all of them needing to be marshalled and herded into lines in the right order, with the right soloists, at the right time, and expecting to sing the same music that the conductor is about to conduct.

Inverness NYCoS Junior Choir 1

That it happens at all is a triumph. Add to this the impressive musical abilities of these young singers and you can begin to see why the National Youth Choir of Scotland’s nationwide choral education programme is rapidly becoming one of the most exciting arts initiatives in Britain, if not in Western Europe.

The concert opened with the Trainers Choir – the youngest of the four – and the Gascony Carol Wind Through The Olive Trees, followed by an arrangement of the Japanese Moon Song in which a plangent solo was more than capably sung by Jennifer Czerniakiewicz.

Sweeping hand movements in the choir trace out the phrasing of the lines and subtly introduce the concept of pure legato. Next, a riotous medley of Gospel songs, in which Swing Low Sweet Chariot, The Saints Go Marching In, and I’m Gonna Sing Sing Sing are sung simultaneously in the final bars.

The next choir to take the stage is the smallest of the four. The Youth Choir numbers about 20 and for this concert repeated their successful performance at Eden Court Nurses Carol Concert of a Hebrew song, Al Shlosha by Allan E Naplan.

They were swiftly followed by Junior Choir One, or JC1 as it is inevitably known, with an unlikely but entertaining Polish song about loading bananas. Lucky they have the young Pole Jan Podpora as soloist in the tongue twisting and rapidly accelerating verses. Then the Japanese Frog Song in four part canon and some echo singing in Do You Hear What I Hear? by Gloria Shane.

Central to NYCoS philosophy is the concept of musicianship as set out 50 years ago by the great Hungarian pedagogue Zoltan Kodaly. The next song, the Maranoa Lullaby, incorporated some of the hand signs that underpin Kodaly’s system of pitch recognition and production. To see an entire choir signing [sic] a song may look like a piece of pointless choreography, but children lucky enough to learn how to do this at an early age have laid the foundations for a career in music.

Conductor Margaret Rae cajoles and inspires her young singers with an impressive repertoire of actions. To divide the choir for a canon, she moves swiftly down the front line delineating the parts and then keeps moving back and forth catching entries, endings, and the difficult bits. Her hands fly up to her forehead to say “Think!” or fingers snap shut to demarcate a perfect consonant.

A remarkable duet followed: followers of the Mod will know brother and sister team Donald and Peigi Barker, who scooped a clutch of gold medals in Stornoway in October. Here they repeated their success with Am Pige Ruadh, a traditional song arranged by their mother in close but subtly shifting harmonies. If ever you want to know how singers communicate with each other during a song, here was a perfect and very touching example.

JC2 was next. First a nasty song about wolves which ended with the stern shouted injunction to “keep your hands in your pockets when there are wolves about”. They were joined by some fiddlers for the pentatonic Rainbow Girl and then a pretty re-telling of The Holly And The Ivy by Emily Crocker. Mhairi’s Wedding almost lost a verse, much to the alarm of the singers, but it was hastily recovered and sung with appropriate gusto.

The concert was ably accompanied throughout by Christine MacLeod, and the individual songs were announced from within the ranks of the choir by members holding aloft the appropriate national flag – observant readers may have noticed an international theme. All the choirs came together in the Congolese welcome song Si Si Si which closed the concert with noisy élan.

© Christopher Lambton, 2011

Links

• NYCoS