Ensembles
St. Stephen’s Vocal Ensemble
Interested in joining St. Stephen’s Vocal Ensemble?
Our expectation for admission into the Vocal Ensemble are a trained and adaptable voice, experience in ensemble singing, familiarity with the basic repertoire and sight reading skills.
For further information please contact
St. Stephen’s Vocal Ensemble is a chamber choir with about 32 professional and semi-professional singers.
The repertoire includes works of old classical vocal polyphony (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Orlando di Lasso, Tomás Luis de Victoria) as well as pieces for double choir of the Renaissance period (Heinrich Schütz, Hans Leo Hassler).
There are two medieval galleries for music which are used for these occations. One from 1514 in the north aisle and another one from 1448 directly opposite in the south. The distance between them is about 30 metres. This allows works for double choir e.g. music by the former Director of the cathedral music Christoph Strauss (1575-1631) to be performed within its original historical context.
The works of Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741), also former Director of Music at the cathedral and the court, are regularly performed, as well as the complete religious works by Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, both of which had close associations with St. Stephen’s.
St. Stephen’s Vocal Ensemble regularly devotes itself to contemporary liturgical compositions and has already sung a number of world premieres, e.g. John Taverner’s The Martyrdom of St. Stephen which was composed for the cathedral.