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Sam Olluver

Taking place for one night only every two years,  Raising the Roof demonstrates not only the best of the local choral scene, but what it desperately lacks. 
Organised by Bethan Greaves, whose mission   over the past decade has been to expand the range of choral experiences available in the city, the singing extravanganza, which debuted in 2005, boasts  140 singers from five  local community choirs: the Welsh Male Voice Choir,  the Kassia Women's Choir,  the  Hong Kong Melody Makers,  Soho Collective and Hullaballoo.  
Raising the Roof, which will be held at the Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall next Monday, will feature a light repertoire ranging from the Muppets to Madonna,  while each choir will perform their own set before fusing  into one  mega ensemble.
For the first time, the 35-strong Welsh Male Voice Choir will  stand shoulder-to-shoulder with  the 70 members of the Kassia Women's Choir.
'Their initial reaction was: 'We don't sing with women,'' says Bryan Carter, the Welsh Male Voice  Choir's musical director. 'But they soon got over that and, of course, the Cultural Centre is  a wonderful place to perform.' 
Another first may also be in  the pipeline. 
'If we actually do it,' says Carter, 'it will be the first time in over 30 years the choir has sung in Chinese.'
An amateur musician who has sung with choirs around the world, Carter  says  there is nothing like 'the ego trip you get conducting a big choir when they're on song'.
Teacher Cindy Bayne has been singing with the  Kassia Women's Choir under Greaves' direction  for more than five years. Enjoying a social circle outside work isn't  the only satisfaction she gets from the choir. 
'As teachers, we don't often see the results of our work,' she says. 'We don't really know if we're successful until many years  after and it's nice to have a  short-term goal: you get new  music, you practise it for 10 weeks, you do the concert, you're  successful and you move on to something else.'
For Greaves, the buzz sometimes comes at unexpected moments.  In the 2007 Raising the Roof concert, she included a gospel arrangement of the Simon & Garfunkel classic Bridge over Troubled Water   as the encore. 
'We had 120 people on stage singing when the entire audience of about 1,000 suddenly got on their feet and started singing and clapping,' she  says, with a touch of regret that Hong Kong doesn't yet have its own regular gospel choir.
Hullaballoo is the youngest group at next week's show. Aged  five to eight, they'll be directed by Camille Lively  who arrived in  Hong Kong from the US in 2006  and now sings with the Soho Collective, a small group of professional singers.
'There's an outlet for everything here at most levels,' she says. 'That's what I like about the choral scene in Hong Kong.'
One of her frustrations, however, is that performance opportunities are limited for trained singers who don't speak Cantonese.  
'There really isn't an English-language professional level of performance here,' she says. 'I do musical theatre and opera productions quite frequently but there's never the level above  amateur; you have to leave Hong Kong to do that.'
A bigger limitation  on the local choral scene  is  a lack of resources. 
'With Raising the Roof I wanted to give different groups an opportunity to perform in a venue they would never be able to perform in on their own,' says Greaves. 'There's no way  a  single choir would be able to rent that venue and have a decent sized audience to justify it.' 
Patrick Chiu Pak-shing, the musical director of the Hong Kong Melody Makers,    says that despite the abundance of talent around, he senses that choral music is still perceived as a second-rate art form in the city. 
'I think the government has never been too supportive of choral music compared with other  performing arts,' he says.
He sees another  obstacle in the lack of professional choral training at the city's educational establishments, both for singers  and conductors. 
'All singers in universities and the APA [Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts] focus mainly on opera and art song technique,' says Chiu. 'We need a professional and comprehensive graduate programme for choral conducting in Hong Kong.'  
Britain has a tradition of large choruses being attached to professional orchestras, so it's surprising that the country  didn't leave behind a similar choral group for Hongkongers to  join after 150 years of colonial administration.  
Next season, the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra will accompany the Shanghai Opera House Chorus for Orff's Carmina Burana, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Choral, and  a concert performance of his  opera Fidelio.  
Greaves agrees that there is a huge  pool of vocal talent in the city, but regrets there is no respected choral figurehead to gather   singers together.
'I would love it if the Hong Kong Philharmonic got a full-time chorus,' she says. 
'It would be just brilliant if they could get someone who was of  a similar calibre to [the orchestra's  artistic director and chief conductor] Edo de Waart;  someone who  would come in and be prepared  to work incredibly hard.  There  is talent here; there is the market  for it.'
Raising the Roof 2009, Jun 15, 8pm. Hong Kong Cultural Centre Concert Hall. Tickets: HK$120, HK$180 and HK$220. Urbtix. Inquiries: 2575 3931 or 6149 3558




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