NEW DATE: The Vienna Boys Choir will perform at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, March 12, at Penn State York’s Pullo Family Performing Arts Center. Ticket prices are $65 and $50 and are on sale now. Tickets can be purchased at The Pullo Center box office, charge by phone at 717-505-8900, or online at ThePulloCenter.com.
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.
Today there are about 100 choristers between the ages of 10 and 14, divided into four touring choirs. The four choirs give about 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. For the fifth time, the choir participated in the New Year’s Concert of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra on Jan. 1, 2012, conducted by Mariss Jansons.
The choirs’ repertoire includes everything from medieval to contemporary and experimental music. Motets and lieder for boys choirs form the core of the touring repertoire, as do the choirs own arrangements of quintessentially Viennese music, waltzes, and polkas by Franz Lehar, Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss.