Now put your hands up...

Members of the Dalhousie Chamber Choir in rehersal (Nick Pearce photo)

It takes awhile before I clue in. But yeah, those lyrics are familiar, even the swagger of the singers. Could members of the acclaimed Dalhousie Chamber Choir really be wrapping their tongues around Beyonce’s Single Ladies?

Cause if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it/If you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it/Don’t be mad once you see that he want it …

Sung in bombastic, operatic style, the song is performed like an argument between the sexes—the women’s voices sweet and high, the men’s like low thunder. Single Ladies is a far cry from the choir’s usual classical choral repertoire.

“It started as a bit of a joke,” explains Maria Murphy, a fourth-year music student majoring in voice. “We’ve got this pop concert coming up and we were throwing around crazy song titles when Single Ladies came up. We didn’t actually think he’d do it.”

“He” is Gary Ewer, director of the Dalhousie Chamber Choir. He arranged the song “as if Schubert or Brahms had composed it,” he explains, during a break in rehearsals. “We’re having a bit of fun; it’s presented as a spoof.”

The next concert, Body & Soul, will be performed on both sides of Halifax Harbour: at St. Andrew’s United Church in Halifax on Friday, March 19 and at Grace United Church in Dartmouth on Saturday, March 20. Besides Single Ladies, other songs on the program include Light My Fire by The Doors, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, A Groovy Kind of Love and an arrangement of the Mika song Any Other World by student composer Michael Robson.

“These students are such good vocalists that you can expect a high level of performance from them,” says Mr. Ewer, who teaches aural perception and music theory at Dalhousie. He also directs the Dalhousie Coro Collegium, a much larger choral ensemble comprised of students and community singers. “It’s such a pleasure working with them.”

The respect is mutual. “He’s pretty enthusiastic. He likes to joke around but he’s serious when he has to be,” says Ms. Murphy, from Saint John, N.B.

“And anyway,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s been fun to hear him say, ‘OK, take it from ‘I’m up on him, he up on me.’”