Neuqua choir makes detour to sister city

The highlight of the Neuqua Valley High School choir's nine-day European tour this month almost didn't happen.

The choir was scheduled to sing in Hungary, Austria and Slovakia - but not in a Slovakian city called Nitra.

That didn't fly with members of Naperville's Sister Cities Commission, who have nurtured a partnership with Nitra since 1993 promoting cultural exchange, peace and cooperation.

"You must go to Nitra," Laurie Donahue, Sister Cities Commission chairwoman, told the choir's directors, Jay Kellner and Ryan Rimington.

They're glad they obliged.

"They rolled out the red carpet for us," Kellner said about the Nitra citizens and city officials who welcomed the group for a performance on June 6 in a recently renovated gallery within the city hall.

"The audience members could not have been more appreciative of the American music that we brought to them."

The choir sang "I've Got the World on a String" and "Sweet Honey in the Rock," American folk music, spirituals, gospel songs, vocal jazz and Native American tunes from the Navajo and Cherokee tribes. About 70 members from all of the school's six choirs combined to form a new group for the tour.

"We could never really anticipate how cool it was getting to share American music with people who spoke a different language and lived a different life in a different country," choir member Zach Honer said.

"You don't think of it as a culture, you just think of it as life. But when you're immersed in a different culture, it becomes clear."

His words would make Sister Cities leaders proud.

Naperville and Nitra are partnered through Sister Cities International, a nonprofit program established 60 years ago by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to foster diplomacy, understanding and peace across the world.

Naperville studied cities in Czechoslovakia in the early 1990s, searching for a city similar in size and other characteristics to become its partner. Nitra, with about 90,000 residents when Naperville had around 100,000, seemed the perfect fit, said Rosemary Macko Wisnosky, a Sister Cities Commission member and Honorary Consul of the Slovak Republic in Chicago who helped with the selection.

When the Neuqua students arrived, they found a city celebrating its 750th anniversary, a historic place with beautiful architecture mixed among everyday modern buildings.

"It's very cool to see how they contrast each other," Neuqua choir member Morgan Reid said.

Before singing to an audience of a couple hundred, including Nitra's deputy mayor and officials from the U.S. Embassy in Slovakia, Neuqua students were shown the city's main sites, including a new theater, churches and Medieval remnants.

"It became the focal point of the tour," Kellner said about the choir's time in Nitra.

The city is set in a hilly area, and it wasn't quite as urban as Budapest in Hungary or Vienna in Austria - the other stops the choir made on its nine-day tour that cost nearly $4,000 per student.

"You did really see the parallels between Naperville and Nitra," Honer said. "It was one of the more suburban areas we visited."

As a nod to their hosts, the Neuqua students sang a Slovakian patriotic song called "Aka Si Mi Krasna." Reid said their peers in choir from a Slovakian high school complimented their pronunciation, which they perfected with the help of two choir members who are of Czech heritage.

The Slovakian choir returned the favor, singing in English the Josh Groban song "You Raise Me Up," coincidentally one of the same tunes Neuqua choir members sang last year when they performed at their school's graduation.

Neuqua Principal Bob McBride attended as one of about 10 chaperons and said he made a connection with a principal in Nitra, with whom he might arrange future exchanges between students and classrooms.

"We want this to be the start of a much closer relationship of our high school, Neuqua, with the schools in Nitra," Donahue said.