This year's celebration of Nelson Mandela's centenary will bring many "goosebump" moments but perhaps none more poignant than in Regina Mundi Catholic Church, Soweto, on August 17.
That's when one of the world's leading orchestras will play a new piece commissioned from one of South Africa's top composers to pay tribute to the country's greatest son.
Bongani Ndodana-Breen, born in 1975 in Queenstown, just over 200km from Mandela's home in Qunu, told the Sunday Times this week that the Minnesota Orchestra had given him a once-in-a-lifetime experience with its commission - via US concert tour organiser Classical Movements - for Harmonia Ubuntu, a 15-minute composition for soprano and orchestra.And he said the inclusion of Soweto's "people's church" - a gathering place and refuge during the liberation struggle - in the orchestra's tour was the cherry on top.
His composition, featuring Mandela's words, and rhythms and scales typical of the Xhosa music the former president grew up hearing, took its cue "from a man who rose above his circumstances and became a global humanist", he said. "I'm hoping it conveys something about Mandela's universal human values."
The liberation struggle and its great personalities have been a theme in Ndodana-Breen's work since 2010, when Hani told the story of Chris Hani, the SACP leader who was assassinated in 1993.
In 2011 Winnie: The Opera brought the story of Mandela's second wife to the stage, and on Mandela's 95th birthday in 2013 Ndodana-Breen premiered Credo, which celebrated the Freedom Charter.
Harmonia Ubuntu felt like a closing of the Mandela circle after working so closely with family members and acquaintances on the Madikizela-Mandela project, he said. "As I was working, I thought, 'They're part of the same constellation but they are such very different people.'..