The Salzburg Bach Choir was founded in 1983, and during its nearly 40-year existence has developed into one of the leading vocal ensembles both in Austria and internationally. The Choir regularly appears at the Salzburg Festival, performing to acclaim in numerous concerts and also in staged opera productions. Operatic highlights include Idomeneo, Theodora, the world premiere of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, Ariodante and Alcina. The Choir also appears regularly at Salzburg Mozartwoche, most recently in productions of Lucio Silla, Orfeo ed Euridice, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Thamos. At the Salzburg Easter Festival it has appeared in Tosca and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg under Christian Thielemann. The Choir has given guest performances at the Vienna Musikverein, the Brucknerhaus in Linz, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Berlin Konzerthaus, at the Handel Festivals in Halle and Göttingen and the Enescu Festival in Bucharest, with the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra and in France, Italy, Greece, Spain and Switzerland. In 2019 the Choir sang in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony under Kirill Petrenko at the Bregenz Festspielhaus. Recent highlights have included a televised performance of Mozart’s Requiem with the Staatskapelle Dresden under Christian Thielemann at the Salzburg Easter Festival, which was postponed until autumn 2021 due to the pandemic.
Thanks to its flexible resources and stylistic versatility, the Salzburg Bach Choir is able to perform a wide repertory, extending from the vocal polyphony of the Renaissance to the great Baroque, Classical and Romantic oratorios, and on to 20th-century works. It has also gained an international reputation for its interpretations of contemporary music, including world premieres by Georg Friedrich Haas and Mauricio Sotelo.
In addition to its focus on Mozart, the Salzburg Bach Choir also specializes in a cappella works and each year organizes its own series of concerts under the title Chorage®, exploring five centuries of music. Its regular performances of Tallis’s 40-part Spem in alium at Salzburg’s St Peter’s Church have been as critically acclaimed as its interpretations of works by György Ligeti and Beat Furrer at the International Mozarteum Foundation’s Dialoge Festival.
The Salzburg Bach Choir performs under many outstanding conductors and with renowned orchestras such as the Vienna Philharmonic, the Mozarteum Orchestra and Camerata Salzburg, Les Musiciens du Louvre, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. The Choir enjoys close, long-term working partnerships with Ivor Bolton, Leopold Hager, Andrés Orozco-Estrada, Hans Graf, Gianluca Capuano, Adam Fischer, Sascha Goetzel, Christian Thielemann and Ingo Metzmacher.
