Wakkerstroom, a small town famous for its birds and birdsong, will soon have music in the air too. Internationally renowned as a “birder’s paradise” and surrounded by mountains, vleis, kloofs and springs, a cultural highlight on its calendar is the music festival that takes place from March 20-22.
The Wakkerstroom Music Festival, now in its 15th year, provides a container for rejuvenation and transformation “far from the madding crowd”. Audiences can look forward to 26 performances and a gala closing concert.
The musical equivalent of the acclaimed film Babette’s Feast about the life-changing power of gastronomy, the nuanced and pioneering festival programme offers a banquet of enchantment for diverse audiences.
The co-ordinator of the festival, Linette van der Merwe, is a professional mezzo-soprano and lecturer in the department of humanities education at the University of Pretoria. The prevailing organising philosophy is “all hands on deck”, with residents chipping in where they are needed, including taking tickets at the door and providing accommodation to visiting performers for a token fee.
“It’s a magical time,” says Wakkerstroom resident Alexandra Patz, who is hosting theorbo player Dillon Davie. “There are so many visitors in town, all the accommodation is fully booked months in advance, every restaurant is busy and the streets are full of music lovers.”
A musician and music teacher based in Joburg, Davie plays with the Renaissance & Baroque Ensemble and the African Renaissance Ensemble. The theorbo, a long-necked lute popular in the 16th to 18th centuries, is on loan from the Buskaid Soweto String Ensemble.
One of the most eagerly awaited performances will be a tribute to the celebrated English Renaissance composer, singer and lutenist John Dowland, who died in 1626. His melancholic lute songs and instrumental works influenced Elizabethan music and modern classical guitarists. Davie and tenor opera singer Chris Mostert will perform Dowland’s works in a repertoire entitled Flow My Tears.
“It’s music that has come down through the centuries — it has ebbed and flowed in terms of popularity,” says Davie.
It is widely believed that Dowland and Shakespeare, both leading figures in their fields in Elizabethan London, would have known one another. An unproven anecdote is that Dowland may have assisted Shakespeare with local colour in the setting of Hamlet.
The performance includes a collection of emotionally evocative songs. Come Again is light and jaunty and evidently written by someone who has just fallen in love, Davie says. Other songs are about being heartbroken or lovesick.
“They were not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves,” Davie says. “Think of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the epic monologues in his plays. Everything is out there; there is no holding back, and that is what comes across in these songs as well.”
It’s music that has come down through the centuries — it has ebbed and flowed in terms of popularity
— Dillon Davie
The festival also gives attention to women composers. “The composers whose works were shelved, overlooked, or quietly attributed elsewhere,” says Van der Merwe.
In a performance entitled Unheard Of, cellist Mietze Dill and pianist Mareli Stolp will focus on unknown or barely known female composers. Dill is completing a PhD at the University of Bloemfontein on the connection between chamber music and Virginia Woolf.
The two women will perform music by English composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth, who was a friend of Woolf’s; US composer and pianist Amy Beach; and pieces by French composers Rita Strohl and Mélanie Bonis.
Vocal coach and rehearsal pianist Paul Ferreira has teamed up with mezzo-soprano Teresa de Wit and Johan Ferreira, the principal oboist of the Joburg Philharmonic Orchestra, for a performance of the works of British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, entitled Unmindful of the Roses.
Tenor Walter Fourie, who has a long history with the festival, is the director of the Nelspruit-based Nocoré Ensemble while also working as an engineer. The ensemble consists of Nelspruit vocalists, including doctors, engineers, school teachers and farmers. All can read music and have sung internationally “from Carnegie Hall to Europe and America”, says Fourie.
Fourie is also organising performers from Alaska — Jaunelle Celaire (soprano), Daniel Strawser (cello) and Dario Martin (piano) — whose performance, Romantic Echoes, consists of romantically themed music.
Wakkerstroom, which means “awake” or “lively” stream, has been known to entice visitors to the festival to invest in property in the town. Diricilla Naidoo, country manager of the educational initiative Teach A Man To Fish SA, says: “March 2024 was my first Wakkerstroom festival. I was so taken with the quality of the artists, the organisation of the festival, the friendliness of the people, the beauty of the town, and the amazing diversity of fare on offer, from fine dining to delicious pub grub, that I decided to buy a share in a holiday home.”
