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
Jan Campanus Vodňanský: Rorando coeli
Jacobus Handl Gallus: Pueri Concinite
Tomaso Ludovico da Vittoria: Ave Maria
Orlando di Lasso: Ola, che bon eccho
Randall Thompson: Alleluia
Slavomír Hořínka: Laudate Dominum and Domine, non est exaltatum
Ivan Kurz: Maria, Mater nostra
Leonard Bernstein : Gloria Tibi
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Veni, Domine and Laudate pueri
Gabriel Fauré: Tantum ergo
Antonín Dvořák: Ave Maria
Jan Novák: Gloria and Ave Maria
Francis Poulenc: Ave Verum Corpus
Arvo Pärt: Peace Upon You, Jerusalem and Zwei Beter
Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir 'Benjamin Britten: This Little Babe'
Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir 'Zdenek Lukaš: Venecek'
Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir 'Arvo Pärt: Zwei Beter'
"The angel voices of the Prague Philharmonic Chidren's Choir lit up the performance in unearthly colors."