Enchanting Vienna

For the second time in 10 years (first was back in 2002), the world renowned Vienna Boys Choir was in Sabah, courtesy of Rotary Club Kota Kinabalu who spent literally two full years in order to make this rare event to happen. Besides bringing one of the world’s best to Sabah, one of the main objectives were to raise funds for the dialysis project that the Rotary Club is organizing, more particularly the International Polio Plus, avoidable blindness as well as the community gravity water project. (Excerpted from Daily Express, our local dailies). 

The Vienna Boys’ Choir, originated more than half a century ago, sang exclusively for the court, at mass, at private concerts and functions and on state occasions in Vienna until the 1920s. Due to insufficient funding after the end of the monarchy, the Vienna Boys Choir was privatized in 1921 and started to give concerts outside of the chapel which immediately turned out to be a great success. Since the 1920s, the choir has collected all kinds of different music styles on its travels (via). The inarguably the oldest and best known boys' choir in the world and was on stage here in Kota Kinabalu on the 29^th and 30^th October 2011 at Sutera harbor Resort and Chancellor Hall (UMS), respectively. We opted for our tickets on the latter. It feels so good to be able to go back to the uni again :). Tickets were ranging from RM250, RM100 and RM50 for the show in UMS. 

The boys are selected from all over the world, China, Australia, Singapore, Japan, Europe, Germany as well as Canada with a total of 25 boys aged between 9 and 13, turning to 10 and 14 based in Vienna in a boarding school. Today, there are around 100 choristers between the ages of 10 to 14 which are divided into four touring choirs. The four touring choirs (by the name Bruckner, Haydan, Mozart and Schubert) are performing around 300 concerts every year. They visit virtually all European countries, and they are frequent guests in Asia, Australia and the Americas. The choir's repertoire includes everything from medieval over classical to contemporary and experimental music as well as children’s operas.

One thing that captured my attention (excerpted from the daily) on a press conference between Daily Express and the boy’s choir 32 years old conductor was that; at the boys’ age as young as 9 (to 13) as a touring group at the same time studying in a boarding school, when do they actually go to school? According to Kerem (the conductor), there were 3 semester in a year whereby the first one is the touring semester. The second and third one will be from January to March, and April to June respectively. They go to school in the morning for four hours and two hours of rehearsal, mid break, lunch break and resume with schooling from 2.30pm to 6pm before dinner and leisure time.

He added, since the boys will be touring 2-3 months in a year, by singing for all big presidents and prime ministers, holding press conferences worldwide, speaking to waiters asking for a fork, meeting fans singing for autographs and taking pictures are also a form of education, which I couldn’t agree more :).

Throughout the performances, photographs and video-taping were strictly prohibited and everyone as far as I can see seemed to adhere to the regulations. Thus, I was a little disappointed that time as I was practically geared up with all-formatted memory cards, summing to a total of 25 GB from both DSLR and compact in all but I didn't muster up enough courage to whip out my camera at all :P.

The night started promptly at 2000hr sharp with a short customary speech by the Rotarian representative and brief introduction about Vienna Boys Choir by the conductor. The choir, which went by the theme "Enchanting Vienna" making a debut with Ach, Lieb, ich muss dich lassen (My darling, I must leave you). The performances promptly followed on and lasted for about an hour or so before taking a short intermission before resuming with the second half of the program. Most of the songs were presented in French and Italian. Thanks to the booklet we were asked to buy for RM2 each (in buy one free one basis), which comprised a complete compilations of the songs presented along with English translation. Throughout the performance, there were barely any pause or brief introduction between each songs, thus we could hardly trace where which song were we in until the 10^th song which was carried out in English with a frequent repetition of ‘Moses, Moses’, which was also its title :P

Since there were two empty seats on my left, a brother in Christ who was about the age of the boss, also a close friend of ours who came for the performance alone joined us during the interval and was seated next to me through the second half. I finally whipped out my camera thinking that I have someone big whom I can count-on covering me on the sideway when I start snapping and video-ing away. Funny thing was that the first sentence he asked was ‘why are you guys bringing so many cameras?’ (little did we know that photography were prohibited earlier) and the sentence he repeatedly mentioned was ‘don’t put on your flash’ and went on ‘else, we’ll both be caught’. LOL. So, I kept it minimal with the aid of the shawl I brought along :P. 

The choir infixed a couple of Chinese songs by the title “Bang Chhun-hong” (Longing for the spring breeze) in Taiwanese Hokkien and “Xiang Jia Le” in Mandarin. The crowd was very much livened up when the choir ended up the performance with a famous local song, Gunung Kinabalu; which was not included in their repertoire earlier. We were told that the songs were practiced in a mere span of two days. Audiences were clapping along in glee and started to sing along. We were allowed to have our photos taken with the choristers but we gave that a miss because we didn’t want to be caught in the post-performance congestion (both traffic and human) :P

Personally, I was very impressed with the all the boys that they manage to memorize what seemed to me to be a rather long speech with very minimal referring to the notes (only for a few number of songs). Not to mention, am utterly amazed with the angelic voices they had. They seriously deserved a pat on their back for putting up a really good show and it was an enchanting Viennese evening indeed :)