Wednesday, December 29, 2010

.....

So...yeah, I wrote the other day that trying to find great choruses in Austria is like trying to find great country music in Seattle.  Now, "obviously" that meant as a snub to the Vienna Boy's Choir.  With few exceptions, they're generally as interesting as Dane Cook (...and I'm a man who hates me some Dane Cook).  Now, for all I know I could still be quite wrong about Seattle's country scene, but obviously I forgot about Karajan's chorus of choice, the Wiener Singverein.  Now, the Singverein probably doesn't belong on the list.  It's the 200-voice choir that probably gave rise to the idea of performing all sorts of works with 200-voice choirs that should never be performed by them (in their defense it was entirely acceptable by the standards of the early 1900's).  But, it's a musically significant choir that premiered the Brahms Requiem and the Bruckner Te Deum, Schmidt's Book of Seven Seals and took part in the Mahler Symphony of a Thousand premiere.  So they deserve at least mention ...


(Karajan and the Singverein in the Bruckner Te Deum.  Jochum's better...)

....Does anybody in the remotest possibility care one iota about this?

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