Chorales in counterpoint

Last year’s World Choir Games in Auckland is the focus of a new series by a leading documentary maker who contrasts a high-powered New York chorus with a homespun group from Kaitāia. BY RICHARD BETTS

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He's a cocky little shit,” says Dr Opeloge Ah Sam affectionately in episode one of Choir Games. Ah Sam's mild opprobrium is directed at Kees, a 17-year-old mechanic who happens to have an attractive tenor voice that the choir director, known to all as Ope, is trying to slip into the Kaitaia Community Voices.

The all-ages group comprises several people like Kees - not cocky little shits, rather singers who are untrained but who have something. Ah Sam aims to make them good enough to appear at the 2024 World Choir Games in Auckland. Ope entered the competition, his wife says, before he had a choir, which seems the wrong way around but here we are. In all, 11,000 singers from nearly 30 countries will take part in the games, and Ah Sam has just seven rehearsals to get his willing but inexperienced group ready.

14,000 kilometres and a million miles away in approach, Francisco Núñez is working his own singers. This is YPC, the Young People's Chorus of New York. They claimed five gold medals at the World Choir Games 2023 in South Korea and are preparing to bring a whisker under 100 singers to New Zealand.

The contrast between the New York and Kaitāia groups is one of the threads running through Choir Games, a four-part series from celebrated film-maker Leanne Pooley, best known for her cinematic documentaries about the Topp Twins, Sir Edmund Hillary and Gallipoli.