Vienna Boys Choir

One of the world’s greatest choirs the Vienna Boys Choir returns to New Zealand for a very special national tour this October.

In its first tour of New Zealand since 2005, the Vienna Boys Choir will feature twenty-four carefully chosen choristers between the ages of 10 to 14 performing a wide range of its inspiring repertoire from the Renaissance to works by composers such as Mozart, Johann Strauss and Schubert.

A highlight of the tour will include the premiere of a new work by composer Elena Kats-Chernin. Based on the much-loved Australian poem My Country by Dorothea Mackellar, the piece has been specially commissioned for the choir for this visit.

For more than 500 years the Vienna Boys Choir (or Wiener Sängerknaben) has been an enduring symbol of Europe, having performed woks of composers such as Fux, Salieri, Haydn, Bruckner and Schubert (who was himself a chorister) as well as conductors such as Claudio Abbado, Leonard Bernstein, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Sir George Solti.

The choir is one of the world’s most active musical ensembles and performs over 300 concerts a year. While providing the music for the Sunday Mass in Vienna’s Imperial Chapel – which they have done since 1498! – the choir also tours internationally, performing each year in some of the world’s finest concert halls.