The Colonial Presents The Vienna Boys Choir 12/9

The Vienna Boys Choir will be coming to the Colonial on December 9 at 7:30pm. Tickets are $55 and $35 and may be purchased in person at the Colonial Ticket Office at 111 South Street Monday-Friday 10pm-5pm, performance Saturdays 10pm-2pm, by calling (413) 997-4444 or online at www.TheColonialTheatre.org. This performance is sponsored by WMHT.

The world's most beloved choir has been thrilling audiences young and old for over 500 years with their unique mix of sacred and secular music. They've sung for kings and princes, Mozart and Bruckner, and now their eagerly anticipated tours play to sell-out crowds annually. Celebrate the holiday season with the angelic voices of the Vienna Boys Choir, voices of pure silver and gold.

Boys have been singing at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor since the early 15th century. In 1498, more than half a millennium ago, Emperor Maximilian I moved his court and his court musicians to Vienna. He gave instructions that there were to be six singing boys among his musicians. Historians have settled on 1498 as the foundation date of the Vienna Hofmusikkapelle and-in consequence-the Vienna Boys Choir. Until 1918, the choir sang exclusively for the imperial court, at mass, at private concerts and functions, and on state occasions.
Musicians like Heinrich Isaac, Paul Hofhaimer, Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Johann Joseph Fux, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonio Caldara, Antonio Salieri and Anton Bruckner worked with the choir. Composers Jacobus Gallus and Franz Schubert, and the conductors Hans Richter, Felix Mottl and Clemens Krauss were themselves choristers. Brothers Joseph and Michael Haydn were members of the choir of St. Stephen's Cathedral, and frequently sang with the imperial boys' choir.

In 1918, after the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire, the Austrian government took over the court opera, its orchestra and the adult singers, but not the boys' choir. The Vienna Boys Choir owes its 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 Sängerknaben (Vienna Boys Choir), 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.

Today there are around 100 choristers between the ages of ten and fourteen, divided into four touring choirs. 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.

Together with members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera Chorus, the Vienna Boys Choir maintains the tradition of the imperial musicians: as Hofmusikkapelle they provide the music for the Sunday Mass in Vienna's Imperial Chapel, as they have done since 1498. Gerald Wirth took over as the choir's artistic director in 2001.

The choir's repertoire includes everything from medieval to contemporary and experimental music. Motets and lieder for boys' choir form the core of the touring repertoire, as do the choir's own arrangements of quintessentially Viennese music, waltzes and polkas by Strauss, Lanner and Lehar.

Both the choir and the Hofmusikkapelle have a long tradition of commissioning new works. Austrian composers Heinz Kratochwil, HK Gruber (himself a former chorister), Ernst Krenek and Balduin Sulzer have written works for the choir.

The Vienna Boys Choir performs major choral and symphonic works, sometimes as part of the Hofmusikkapelle, sometimes with other orchestras and men's choirs. They are regularly asked to supply soloists for large choral and orchestral works, such as Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, Mahler's Das klagende Lied. In recent years, they have performed with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Staatskapelle Berlin, the Oslo Philharmonic and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Recent guest conductors include Pierre Boulez, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mariss Jansons, Zubin Mehta, Riccardo Muti (honorary member of the Hofmusikkapelle), Kent Nagano, Seiji Ozawa and Simone Young.

Choristers also take part in opera performances at the Vienna State Opera, the Vienna Volksoper and the Salzburg Festival.

Children's Operas
Children's Operas are an important part of the repertoire: The boys all love to act. The choir started performing operas in the 1920s, beginning with classics such as Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne, Weber's Abu Hassan or Haydn's Der Apotheker. Benjamin Britten wrote the vaudeville The Golden Vanity for the choir, and conducted its premiere at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1967 in the presence of HM The Queen Elizabeth II.

In the last decade, the choir has successfully produced a number of new operas. Gerald Wirth's The Journey of the Little Prince and The Tablet of Destinies, an opera based on the Babylonian myth of Anzu and Raoul Gehringer's Moby-Dick, based on the novel by Herman Melville, were all shown at Vienna's Musikverein, another work has been commissioned for 2010.

World Music and Cross Over Projects
Since the 1920s, the choir has collected music from around the world. One of the choir's goals is to introduce the boys to as many different styles of music as possible. The choir has commissioned a number of world music projects. As Gerald Wirth explains, "We do not claim to play ‘authentic' world music; we create something from the original sources that is our own. We want to be faithful to the source in the sense that we treat it with respect." Silk Road is the choir's third world music project. The colorful journey along the old trade route was staged by Rebecca Scheiner, a stage director at the Vienna State Opera, and features songs from Uzbekistan and China, a qawwali from Pakistan, a ghazal from Iran and field hollers from Tajikistan, all sung in the original languages. Pirates tells the story of 18th-century pirates, using music from Yemen, Madagaskar, the Caribbean and Latin America.

The choristers, who also sing popular music, have contributed to a number of soundtracks for major motion pictures in the USA, Japan and Europe.

Gerald Wirth, the choir's artistic director, received his first musical training as a member of the choir and at the Bruckner Konservatorium in Linz, Austria, where he studied voice, oboe and piano. He has conducted choirs and orchestras in many countries, and played and sung himself in a number of ensembles.

His first love is the voice; as is evident from his compositions: he has written two children's operas, a Mass, motets and countless arrangements for choirs. He finds much of his inspiration in myths and philosophical texts. Many of his works have been performed internationally.

In 2001, Gerald Wirth became the artistic director of the Vienna Boys Choir. While he is keenly aware of the choir's rich tradition, Wirth also explores new ways to create and make music. He has instigated a number of projects involving world music, a cappella pop and film music. Wirth firmly believes that music has a positive influence on every aspect of a personality.

Tickets are $55 and $35 and may be purchased in person at the Colonial Ticket Office at 111 South Street Monday-Friday 10am-5pm, performance Saturdays 10am-2pm, by calling (413) 997-4444 or online at www.TheColonialTheatre.org.

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