A step toward knocking down the barriers between race, religion and class across the world was taken in the Ruth Seaton James Centre on Monday night.

In an evening of fusion, chapel and concert hall came together, as well as black and white, old and new, high brow and down-to-earth.

Because on stage was the South African group SDASA Chorale and I Fagiolini in a heartwarming alliance of two very disparate worlds.

And the mixed audience lapped it up. The boisterous and technically magnificent performance, called Simunye, must be one of the most unusual concerts to have been performed in Bermuda.

Simunye is Zulu for "We are one'' and is the result of a series of cultural exchanges after the abolition of apartheid in South Africa.

Each group retains its own culture in the performance, but the exchange of ideas produce a vibrant concert.

The Zulu language fused with 14th century French, the three bar of European music turned to four bar African sounds. And traditional Zulu music was melded with the backdrop of the sounds of Europe.

But it is not just this blend of two musical styles that makes this an extra ordinary concert. It was the dynamism, the energy and the sheer joy both groups obviously got at performing together on stage.

They both swung into the spirit of it, with the stiff-upper-lipped Brits learning (kind of) to sway, dance, clap and stomp as they sang. The fact that they were `good sports' about it added to the general atmosphere of goodwill and humour that prevailed throughout the evening.

The leaders of both groups explained each piece of music before it was performed with sensitivity - and a great deal of humour, poking fun at themselves and each other and raising more than just a cursory laugh from the audience.

Both Robert Hollingworth, director of I Fagiolini and Boyce Seoketsa, and leader of the SDASA, were the stars of the show.

Hollingworth poked fun at how they had to learn to dance and perform from the head down, showing a great deal of humility by apologising for their dancing performance.

And Seoketsa, a pastor in Standerton in the province of Mpumalang in South Africa, was big enough to laugh at himself for starting to preach from the stage, because there was a real religious feel to the show. Not so much that if you were not religious you would not still enjoy it heartily, but enough to whip the audience up into a few spontaneous "Amens'' and "Yes brothers''.

The SDASA are Seventh Day Adventists and much of their work is based on African church music.

Although South Africa has 11 languages, much of their singing was in Zulu, English and, amazingly enough, Mediaeval French in the adapted love song Douce Dame Jolie.

This technically superb song was one of the most complex of the evening. Too modern in adaptation for my taste, it was still a spectacular show of voices, harmony and rhythm. There was also a religious tone of the a capella music by the British I Fagiolini, with European church music such as O Clap Your Hands, a 17th Century song by Orlando Gibbons and adapted for the group by Roderick Williams.

The loudest clap of the evening went to a traditional Zimbabwe Song which the groups found in an archive.

Before the groups took the stage, it was explained that the song, Nyamaroda, was originally performed on an instrument made of a calabash with strings, with voices.

This witty piece started with one of the I Fagiolini moving to centre stage and making plucking noises while wiggling his fingers as if plucking a chord.

He was followed by three other members making different plucking sounds joining him, and the first four layers of the song grew.

And the weaving continued, with four baritones walking up and joining in, a man making the sound of a maracas and drop by drop they joined in adding piece upon piece this complex and enthralling song made up of polyrhythmic layers of sound.

As it continued to fuse and meld, you could not tell where one sound started and another stopped. It was transfixing. And as smoothly as it had started, to build, it was taken apart, until the one man making his plucking sounds remained, and drowned out by the noise of clapping, he looked around as if he was surprised to be left on his own, and scarpered.