National Arts Festival: A Music Perspective

Music and imagination formed the most enjoyable part of day four in Grahamstown for A Feast of Tales. Our first encounter was Nefilibata which was a dance piece set to light, uplifting sounds. The ‘dancers’ were in fact musical theatre students who gave a delightful presentation of a love story using contemporary dance, mime, and props designed to look like clouds and birds. The Festival Gala Concert was our second. Conducted by the personable Richard Cock and played by the Eastern Cape Philharmonic Orchestra, the well-attended performance delivered a variety of pieces that were explained by the conductor. So, we heard a piece to which the composer had, on its debut, invited women with the name (and variants of) ‘Anne’; another set composed by an Eastern Cape man in the midst of pain and sorrow; a concerto about a ‘gold and silver’ ball; chariots of fire; a piece called Mambozart; and beautiful compositions performed by the Standard Bank young performer of the year. All were designed to transport us listeners to a place of beauty and grandeur. Death of a Donut, while not exactly doing the latter, was nevertheless a fun murder mystery show – accompanied by suitably mysterious music – in which the audience was involved in the implication and solving of the murder. A number of school boys attending the performance were ecstatic when one of their teachers ‘died’ and the other ‘implicated’ in a murder. Women in Theatre, part of a Thinkfest, was definitely not musical, nor did it do much to stir the imagination. A little disappointed with its depth we left feeling that much more could have been made of the topic.

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