Leipzig’s Boys Choir at Esplanade

Carla Bianpoen ,  CONTRIBUTOR ,  JAKARTA   |  Sat, 02/28/2009 10:45 AM  |  Music

St. Thomas Boys Choir: (Courtesy of Esplanade)

On March 6, the famed St. Thomas Boys’ Choir from Leipzig is making their debut at the Esplanade’s 1,600 seat concert hall in Singapore.  

The renowned choir is a 55-member-strong ensemble of boys aged between 10 and 18.  The concert celebrates two master composers who were Leipzig locals. Johann Sebastian Bach was a master composer in the Western Baroque tradition.

Felix Mendelssohn, while  conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, helped revive interest in Bach’s music 80 years after the latter’s death.

This concert commemorates the bicentennial of Mendelssohn’s birth.

Closely linked to St. Thomas’ Church in Leipzig, Germany, the St Thomas Boys’ Choir  looks back on an 800-year history and can boast a direct line back to Johann Sebastian Bach himself, who served as cantor for a 27-year tenure from 1723 until his death in 1750.  

Born in 1685, Bach became cantor of the school adjacent to St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig as well as director of music for the principal churches in town.  At the time, the boys’ choir was already 475 years old.

His job required him to instruct students of the school in singing and  provide weekly music at the two main churches in Leipzig, St Thomas and St  Nicholas.

Out of Bach’s decades of prolific teaching and composing in Leipzig, we have a most astounding richness of the world’s unmatched mastery of the Baroque style.

The majority of Bach’s keyboard and vocal compositions were created there: cantatas, motets, his Christmas and Easter oratorios, his passions, the Magnificat, the Art of the Fugue, the Notebook for Anna Magdalena, the Musical Offering, the Goldberg Variations, and his insurmountable Mass in B minor.

During this time he composed his most important works, one of which was St. Matthew’s  Passion. In fact he composed so many church cantatas that one could be sung every Sunday in succession for five years without having to repeat.

Today choir members live together in a sort of boys’ town, a community that somewhat replaces family and school, with older boys taking care of the younger ones.

Every day they rehearse for five hours, learn a new Bach cantata evey week and give three public concerts every weekend.

Not surprisingly, they are considered the most steadfast keepers of Bach’s legacy.

The heart of the choir’s repertoire is the sacred music they perform during services at St. Thomas’ Church: Bach’s motets, oratorios, passions and masses.

The choir also performs secular vocal music, madrigals and other a cappella works from the Renaissance to the present day.

They  not only specialize in Bach but also in the works of Felix Mendelssohn, who during his short-lived career (1809–1847) learned to compose by studying the then obscure music of Bach.

Georg Christoph Biller, the 16th cantor of the choir will conduct a repertoire of works by both composers.

Tickets range between S$38 and $118,  available at SISTIC (+65 6348 555), www.sistic.com.sg. For more information contact Sangeetha Madhavan at +65 97961140.    

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