The Salzburg Bach Choir was founded in 1983, and is 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. Highlights have included the world premiere of Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel, Handel’s Ariodante and Alcina, and Orff’s De temporum fine comoedia.
At the Salzburg Easter Festival the Choir has sung in several of Richard Wagner’s operas, and has most recently appeared under Antonio Pappano in Ponchielli’s La Gioconda and Verdi’s Messa da Requiem. 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 George Enescu Festival in Bucharest, with the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic Orchestra and in France, Italy, Greece, Spain and Switzerland.
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.
In addition to its focus on Mozart, an important part of the Salzburg Bach Choir’s work is its own concert series, Chorage®. For its 40th anniversary in 2024, the Choir commissioned compositions from Mark Simpson and Konstantia Gourzi, among others. The Choir’s a cappella repertory spans more than five centuries: its performances of Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in alium have been as much 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 Prince — Monaco, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden. The Choir enjoys ongoing collaborations with Ivor Bolton, Ingo Metzmacher, Hans Graf, Gianluca Capuano, Adam Fischer, Sascha Goetzel and Christian Thielemann.
