The here captured on this old recording is South Africa. The year is 1962 and that is Igor Stravinsky, the Russian Bon composer and conductor.

The great maestro was here to conduct the state broadcaster,

S-A-B-C Symphony Orchestra, in a series of concerts.

I feel very strongly and very acutely the need to perform my own

verse and to speak myself to the public you you know, not through somebody.

I'm Michael Dingan, and I'll be telling this mostly forgotten story of

Stravinsky in South Africa for the BBC World Service. I'm a singer of

South Africa's distinctive and unique choral music. I organize

choir festivals and train conductors and like Stravinsky, I'm a conductor.

What's extraordinary about his visit to my country

is that at a time when the apartheid regime believed

classical music was the domain of white people.

Stravinsky insisted on performing his music before an audience of black people.

And, amazingly, that concert on 27th, May 1962 took place in my hometown, Guatema, which is east of Johannesburg. We were so fortunate some of us to have listened to his works and seen him live.

We organized our school choirs, our church choirs, we organized the then very

small community choirs. We definitely were about a thousand which was quite in attendance for a

concert of that nature. That brilliant guy yeah. And this music now, which is so thrilling, giving me goosebumps is the actual Quatema concert.

This is probably the first time it's been heard publicly since it was recorded 55 years ago.

In fact, it may well never have been heard again because it was not catalogued but by a stroke of luck

The producers of this BBC program stumbled across the old reel-to-reel tape on the shelves

of SAPC's music archives. Stravinsky arrived in South Africa to perform with the Whites-only

S-A-B-C orchestra at a tumultuous time. Two years earlier at least 69 people had been killed and 200 injured when police opened

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