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The World Famous Singing Ambassadors from Austria
Vienna Boys' Choir Live in Bangkok
A musical journey travelling through the world of the great Classical Composers, Pirates and the magnificent Alps…
The Vienna Boys’ Choir is one of the oldest boys’ choirs in the world. Founded in 1498 as court choir of Emperor Maximilian I, the choir accompanied Austrian history in politics for more than five hundred years. By now, the Vienna Boys’ Choir has become a fixed attraction in Austrian musical life.
Its first-class training has produced numerous famous musicians, such as Franz Schubert. Antonio Salieri, then head of the imperial music and Mozart’s erstwhile rival, noted Schubert’s talent during his entry examination, and took him under his wing. Schubert’s musical training at the choir school laid the foundations for his later compositions; his first works were written while he was at the school.
In 1918, after the breakdown of the Habsburg empire, the Austrian government took over the court opera (i.e. the opera, its orchestra and the adult singers), but not the choir boys. The Wiener S?ngerknaben owe their survival to the initiative of Josef Schnitt, who became Dean of the Imperial Chapel in 1921. Schnitt established the boys’ choir as a private institution: the former court choir boys became the Wiener S?ngerknaben, the imperial uniform was replaced by the sailor suit, then the height of boys’ fashion. Funding was not enough to pay for the boys’ upkeep, and in 1926 the choir started to give concerts outside of the chapel, performing motets, secular works, and - at the boys’ request – children’s operas. The impact was amazing: Within a year, the Wiener S?ngerknaben were performing in Berlin (where Erich Kleiber conducted them), Prague and Zurich. Athens and Riga (1928) followed, then Spain, France, Denmark, Norway and Sweden (1929), the United States (1932), Australia (1934) and South America (1936).
Since then, the Vienna Boys’ Choir has performed under nearly all the great conductors: Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Pierre Boulez, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss Jansons, Herbert von Karajan, Carlos Kleiber, Erich Kleiber, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Riccardo Muti, Seiji Ozawa, Sir George Solti, and Bruno Walter.
Today there are around 100 choristers between the ages of ten and fourteen, divided into four touring choirs, named after four composers closely connected with the choir’s history: Anton Bruckner, Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Franz Schubert. Each touring choir has its own conductor; the overall artistic director is 39-year-old Gerald Wirth, himself a former chorister.
The four choirs give around 300 concerts and performances each year in front of almost half a million people. Each group spends nine to eleven weeks of the school year on tour. They visit virtually all European countries, and they are frequent guests in Asia, Australia and the Americas.
Children’s Operas :
Children’s operas are a very important part of the repertoire. The Vienna Boys’ Choir produces one or two stage works every year; they perform classical favourites as well as new works
The successful production of Gerald Wirth’s The Journey of the Little Prince led to an invitation to stage his Die Schicksalstafel, an opera based on the Babylonian myth of Anzu, at Vienna’s Musikverein. In 2004, the Musikverein hosted the world premiere of Raoul Gehringer’s Moby-Dick, based on Herman Melville’s novel.
The Vienna Boys have been singing world music since the 1920s. “There are recordings of native American songs dating to 1931. To us, singing songs from the countries we visit, is something we have always done. It is very much a two-way gift”, says Gerald Wirth. Out of this tradition, the choir has developed its own type of children’s opera: short theatrical pieces are combined with world music. The choir’s Silk Road sends an Austrian boy, a Chinese ghost and a talking camel on a musical journey between Europe and Asia. En route, the trio encounter all manner of people; the music includes a qawwali, a ghazal, a rain dance and field hollers. Pirates, the choir’s newest project, is set to tour Asia. It tells the story of two brothers who are transported back to the 18th century. They find themselves aboard a curious pirate ship, manned by a motley crew looking for treasure. The short opera features sword fights and music from Yemen, Jamaica and Latin America, as well as true shanties and two 18th century ballads on famous pirates.
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CONCERT
: Vienna Boys’ Choir Live in Bangkok 
