Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir

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.

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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.