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When Soweto got Baroque (15 Jul 2007)

Ten years ago I flew from London to Johannesburg on what turned out to be one of the most worthwhile journeys I have ever made as a musician. It was the catalyst for the extraordinary Prom that I will be conducting at the Albert Hall tomorrow.

Fifteen players in my orchestra, the English Baroque Soloists, and I had been summoned to "lend a hand" to an intrepid viola-player-turned-teacher, Rosemary Nalden. A few years before she had started speculatively and single-handedly to distribute string instruments to South African kids in Soweto. The response she received was encouraging, but the raw talent on offer now needed a morale-boosting visit from her colleagues.

So each day for a week, to the utter bafflement of our white hosts in their plush, fenced-in citadel homes, we bussed from Jo'burg to Soweto. Here we were introduced to 15 children, aged seven to 17, equipped with violins, violas, cellos and double basses that had been bought in the UK with money raised by the music charity Buskaid.

In the few years she'd spent with them, Rosemary had already achieved miracles, teaching not just the basics of string technique and baroque and classical style but also a heartwarming approach to music-making as a collective endeavour.

Our mornings were spent in one-to-one encounters - but there was a snag. As musical and serious in their approach as these Soweto children were, they weren't all "getting it". You might perhaps expect Mozart and Haydn to have been something of a struggle; but even the more motoric rhythms of Bach and Handel sounded worthy rather than joyous.

Then inspiration struck. I suddenly thought of Rameau, the almost exact French contemporary of the two great Saxon composers. I phoned our orchestra office in London and soon the ballet music to his operas was spewing out of our hosts' fax machines. When I plonked it on the music stands in Soweto the next day, there was an instant, palpable response: eyes lit up, bows whizzed across the strings, rhythms came alive.

Improbable contact had been made between these young South African musicians and Voltaire's crony, that most crusty, difficult and mannered genius of the French Baroque, Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Why? It has something to do with the combination of tensile strength and grace of Rameau's slower, sensuous music and the sheer physicality of his more earth-bound dances, those wild, exotic tambourins, rigaudons and contredanses which give spice to his opera-ballets.

What the South African musicians displayed was an instinctive, barrier-free response to this music: they quickly latched on to the fluidity of gesture and step and the fusion of melody and dance - surely exactly what Rameau intended.

Take the last dance of his very last opera, Les Boréades. The climax of this five-act tragedy - one that involves an abduction, a royal abdication and a chain of natural disasters on an epic scale - is this contredanse. In the theatre it comes over as a cathartic gesture of release and high jinks. But how did the South Africans respond to it?

For them, they have since told us, it's a "gumboot" dance - a gesture of exultation, even of defiance, such as the mine workers (who were their fathers, uncles and grandfathers) might have danced as they emerged into the twilight after a day spent underground and with nothing more than their boots to give the percussive edge to this dance.

Since that first encounter, I've worked with the Soweto kids on several occasions and each time I have been astonished by the progress they've made. They've certainly "got" Mozart. Samson, their first leader, has recently graduated with distinction from the Royal Northern College of Music; his younger sister Innocentia is an accomplished cellist.

But I've never forgotten that first concert in Johannesburg: 15 pale-faced adult "Baroque-ys" interspersed with 15 African teenage children, two Zulu percussionists in full warrior garb and a choir of skinny men and "traditionally-built" ladies.

The delight in music-making was infectious. Prickly old Rameau would have loved it. Exactly 10 years later, having been invited to present a showcase week of concerts in Paris, I couldn't imagine doing so without including swathes of Rameau's music and seizing the chance to recreate the encounter with Buskaid, this time on Rameau's home turf.

The Parisian audience responded warmly to this intriguing amalgam of robust country dances and voluptuous court music. First our English Baroque Soloists interacted with a very cool, chic Parisian group of HIP (historically informed performance) dancers, the Compagnie Roussat-Lubek. Then the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble countered with their own impressive sequence, Dance for All from Cape Town. It was gumboots versus ballet pumps.

Finally we joined forces - as we will at tomorrow's BBC Prom. The sound of this combined orchestra was both galvanising and moving: two complementary approaches to the same music, ethnically and geographically separate but united by the genius of that still under-appreciated composer - Jean-Philippe Rameau.

www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/07/14/nosplit/bmsoweto114.xml