Classical singing students Lucretia Starke and Arturo den Hartog return to their homeland for a number of concerts with the Holland Baroque music company.
A Surinamese boy and girl, about 12 years old, sing a part of an aria with great dedication. ‘This is it Te Deum van Handel, Georg Friedrich Handel. I think it is beautiful. He’s one of my favorite composers,” the boy says. The girl: ‘I was once shocked by my own voice. Is that me? Now I dream of becoming one of the best opera singers… in the world.’ Singing and dreaming from the heart, that’s what the students of the Kathedrale Koor Paramaribo, to which the NTR program Stage devoted a short, infectiously cheerful documentary on Sunday.
Baroque in Paramaribo is the name of the half-hour film in which two classical singing students from Suriname from the conservatory in The Hague, Lucretia Starke and Arturo den Hartog, return to their homeland. Accompanied by the twenty-strong music company Holland Baroque, they give a number of concerts there, in which they want to introduce as many children as possible to their music. Kids like the first two. Not an easy mission, in a country that still bears the traces of colonialism from a cultural point of view.
The Kathedrale Koor Paramaribo is the place where classical music in Suriname germinates again. Suriname once had three classical orchestras, but the departure of a significant part of the population in the mid-seventies – when the country became independent from the colonizers of the Netherlands – and the long, dark period of the Bouterse dictatorship that followed, destroyed the musical infrastructure. The director of the school for young talent Albert Arens decided to do something about it, founded the cathedral choir in 2009 where primary school students can train daily and now sees how the first generation, embodied by Lucretia and Arturo, sings the stars of heaven .
Holland Baroque encounters unexpected problems in the hot and humid Surinamese climate. The wood of the harpsichord absorbs itself full of moisture, causing it to expand and the pins no longer strum properly. The gut strings of the string instruments are constantly getting out of tune and breaking. Has flown over from America, stiff fishing lines should provide a solution.
In the Brokopondo district, the choir, supplemented by the cathedral choir, plays in front of a moderately filled hall – a flood hinders a larger attendance. It doesn’t stop the musicians and that’s what Handel sounds like to the Maroons in the area – Arturo doubts whether classical music, let alone baroque, has ever been heard in Brokopondo before. The district commissioner promises after the concert to support the musical education of children “as long as I am here”. A small, nevertheless big victory for pioneer Arens.
In the peeling wooden cathedral of Paramaribo, Arturo and Lucretia experience their provisional duet in a duet finest hour for a full church. While their singing sounds, the ‘Hallelujah’ from Handels Messiahthe camera rises to the ridge of the imposing building: image and sound merge into a heavenly moment that lifts everyone up.