Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir

Tuesday, October 16, 2018 | 8:00 pm

Vocal Ensemble Series

Duke Chapel

Founded in 1932, the Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir is the oldest and largest children’s concert choir in the Czech Republic. This award-winning ensemble has been a staple of Czech radio broadcasts, orchestral performances, and opera and theatre productions for close to a century. Like the Latvian Radio Choir (coming to Duke Chapel on November 15), the Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir is a beloved choral institution in the Central and Eastern European tradition and one of its country’s most prized cultural exports.

In the soaring and contemplative space of Duke Chapel, the forty-five member ensemble — selected from the 900 children in the choir’s training program — sings a program of sacred music from the renaissance to the present. The concert includes Victoria’s intricate polyphonic rendering of a plainchant Ave Maria, and continues in a Marian vein with Czech composer Jan Novák’s Ave Maria; Schubert’s Salve Regina; Carl Maria von Weber’s Maria Wiegenlied; and Ivan Kurz’s Maria, Mater Nostra. Among the living Czech composers on the program is Slavomír Hořínka, whose Laudate Dominum is beautifully evocative of ancient liturgical chant.

Program

"The angel voices of the Prague Philharmonic Chidren's Choir lit up the performance in unearthly colors."