Rosemary Nalden

Rosemary Nalden has stopped her ensemble of 20 young South African musicians in the midst of a Scott Joplin tune. They're in rehearsal at the Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. "It's not in tune still," she says to them. "Wake up, all of you--you're so dozy today." The group is jet-lagged--just off the plane from Soweto, the South African township known more for its 1976 anti-apartheid student uprising than for high culture.

Rosemary Nalden has stopped her ensemble of 20 young South African musicians in the midst of a Scott Joplin tune. They're in rehearsal at the Santa Monica Presbyterian Church. "It's not in tune still," she says to them. "Wake up, all of you--you're so dozy today." The group is jet-lagged--just off the plane from Soweto, the South African township known more for its 1976 anti-apartheid student uprising than for high culture.

The Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary's College presented the U.S. debut on Tuesday of the Chandos Baroque Players in the ornate Viennese Room of the Ritz-Carlton Huntington Hotel in Pasadena. And, hardly for the first time in its 20-year history, Da Camera came up winners, as did the large, appreciative audience. The seven-member British ensemble, playing on period instruments, didn't give us style by the numbers but an evening of music-making richly varied in performing styles.

There are many fascinating social and personal dimensions to the story of the Buskaid Soweto String Project. Happily, for at least one anxious critic, they rest on a foundation of solid musical accomplishment. Never lost for long in a marathon love feast, Monday at Royce Hall, was a spirited concert that could be relished on purely artistic terms.