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PIAS News
SCALA on the Rocks
You could be very brief about Scala: a youth choir from Aarschot,
Belgium, roughly sixty teenage girls, directed by two talented
brothers, and enjoying national and international recognition. That
could be it.
You could say a lot more though:
Scala is an exceptional ensemble, inspired by the two brothers Stijn
and Steven Kolacny, who – if they’re not playing piano four hands –
direct their choir in an unparalleled manner. Stijn as the conductor,
Steven at the piano. This combination produces musical fireworks
that have already taken Scala to distant foreign countries and
earned them numerous prizes. During the most bizarre moments, Scala
has stood among the great – and most of the time very loud – big
shots of rock music. For example, at the Lowlands Festival in the
Netherlands, in front of a bewildered, yet thrilled audience. A year
before, the girls choir was on the big stage at Rock Werchter as the
backing vocals section for the headliner Hooverphonic.
Now this was quite a feat, but Scala is taking another big step
again.
You need to have the guts – some call it naïveté – to twist the
repertoire of a youth choir from classical into rock and pop music.
And so they did, with success. We’re talking about sold out concert
halls, fights for the last unsold tickets, lots of media attention
and standing ovations whenever Scala and the Kolacny-brothers
performed their Scala on the Rocks-concerts under the most diverse
circumstances. They performed in the famous Studio 4 of the
renovated Flagey building (during a series of events of the Festival
van Vlaanderen) as well as in the Flanders Expo during the
TMF-Awards 2002, where Scala was featured as special guest. During
these highly appreciated 'pop-concerts' by the youth choir, singers
Jasper Steverlinck (Arid) and Stijn Meuris (Noordkaap/Monza) also
made their appearances. And time and again, it produced a
surprisingly beautiful and even manifested emotional fusion of a
variety of musical genres.
Now, this says something about the turns that a youth choir with a
vision can take. According to Stijn and Steven Kolacny it’s quite
simple though: “Whether it’s Brahms or Garbage, in the end it’s all
'music’. And wouldn’t it be stupid and arrogant to think that an
open-minded audience cannot or should not love both extremes? As a
matter of fact, that is just what the audience does."
This series of concerts Scala on the Rocks was digitally recorded
and is now released on CD. The result is a sometimes startling
document: stripped of all trimmings, reduced to its bare essentials.
The 19 songs (from 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana, 'Creep' by
Radiohead and 'All I Did' by Arid, to 'Van God Los' by Monza...
Scala is game for anything) emerge from the speakers in a very
peculiar way. Every breath is heard, every pedal stroke on the
Bösendorfer grand piano is there, and every feeling is real.
You hear tension, immersion and space. But you hear at least as much
playing and singing pleasure, recorded live, as it sounded in the
live performance. Unique and moving to a great extent. In short, a
bit as the Scala members and both of their frontmen ought to be.
http://www.pias.com/v4/news/page2.asp?ID=90
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