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From the Olympics Toword Tomorrow
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Excitement rises among Olympic singers around the globe
''We've been practicing intensely over the last two months. I hope the results will show in our performance,'' said Ma Qi, one of 200 singers of the China National Symphony Orchestra chorus.
The Chinese choir, like choruses in Berlin, Cape Town, New York and Sydney, will join 2,000 Japanese singers in singing the ''Ode to Joy,'' the monumental finale of Beethoven's 9th symphony.
The global chorus, the grand finale of the two-hour long ceremony at the Minami Nagano Sports Park, will be conducted by Japanese maestro Seiji Ozawa at a concert hall 6 kilometers away.
The singers in the Chinese capital will sing on top of the Shenwu Gate, the northern gate to the Forbidden City and one of Beijing's architectural highlights.
Nagano Olympic organizers took 18 months to negotiate a permit from Chinese authorities as the Forbidden City is exclusively reserved for the use of sightseers.
''I'm very happy to be able to sing at the historic Forbidden City,'' Ma said.
At the request of Ozawa, who was born to Japanese parents in Shenyang in northern China, only the Chinese singers will sing in their mother tongue, mandarin, while all the other choruses will sing in German, the original language of the Beethoven piece.
In Berlin, 200 German singers will be singing in the predawn hours at another historical location, the Brandenburg Gate symbolizing German unification.
Representing global peace and cooperation, the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations headquarters in New York has been chosen as the venue for the choir of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, where Ozawa has served as music director since 1973.
Ozawa has said the biggest challenge will be synchronizing all the choirs and the 50,000 spectators he hopes will sing along.
While their colleagues in the northern hemisphere will wear thick winter coats to cope with the cold, the singers in Sydney, host of the 2000 Olympic Summer Games, will sport Olympic T-shirts in keeping with the summer weather there.
When the Sydney Philharmonic Choir, which includes different ethnic groups, gather on the steps in front of the Sydney Opera House, the city's waterfront landmark, it will be early afternoon.
The 200 South African singers will boast colorful ethnic costumes and, underlining the country's endeavor to overcome the racial segregation inherited from decades of apartheid, will comprise people of all colors uniting three different choirs.
They will perform early morning outdoors in False Bay at Cape Point, near Cape Town, in balmy and -- hopefully mild -- weather.
(Kyodo News)
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Copyright 1998 The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun