Since I am in a temporary hiatus at work (in the professional parlance: on the beach), last evening I skipped and hopped over to the isle of Brooklyn to meet up with old friends, and then hit Prospect Park for a Celebrate Brooklyn concert. I had to go for the concert was billed thusly:

"Cape Town composer Philip Miller's extraordinary international collaboration is based on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings that led South Africa from apartheid to democracy. Opera superstar Sibongile Khumalo joins other South African soloists, a string octet, and a 100-voice chorus composed of Brooklyn's Total Praise Choir of Emanuel Baptist Church, the Williams College Choir, and a South African ex-patriot choir led by Lion King choirmaster Ron Kunene. The music blends seamlessly with samples of recorded TRC testimony and stunning projected images."

Given that South Africa has flickered on the horizon of my imagination¹ for a long time, via bookish engagement with this diamond-glittering lode of pain, through the work of Nadine Gordimer, J.M. Coetzee, and the powerful trilogy of memoirs by Breyten Breytenbach (everyone should atleast read the middle book of this trilogy "The True Confessions of An Albino Terrorist"), this cantata of word, image and sound built on the armature of TRC testimonials by mothers who buried their sons, preists who were mutilated by letter bombs, interrogators clinically describing the tools of their well honed torture trade², and finally P.W. Botha's Kafkaesque assertion that Apartheid, that lovely Afrikaans word, in plain English simply means "good neighborliness", was a really moving experience.

Finally, here are two short NPR clips from the cantata for you to listen.

[1] Also what is recent Indian political history but a explosion of a concept - satyagraha - fashioned in the South African townships?