Anton Bruckner appreciated folklore dance music, but also bourgeois – middle-class – dance culture. In his pocket diary he noted down the balls he had attended and the names of quite a number of his dance partners, who he seems to have impressed considerably with his dancing skills. Marie Madeleine Dürrnberger at least, who was the niece of his first music theory teacher, reported in 1857 that Bruckner was „a pretty good dancer“.
In the 19th century, when the infatuation with ballet was at its height, the music supplied for dancing was not only instrumental – Bruckner himself in his youth, for example, was often able to supplement his meagre teaching assistant's salary as a dance hall fiddler – but also vocal. Songs and choruses by Bruckner and his contemporaries around the theme of dance make up the programme of the Upper Austrian Youth Choir's hour-long concert. At the party afterwards the young singers, together with Maximilian Walch, the winner of a 2019 Amadeus Music Award for the soundtrack of the picture-book album mea culpa, completely transform the Middle Hall into a dance floor with modern choral music von House to Dunstep, rock and pop, and music from Rammstein to Pentatonix. An electrifying choral evening to keep your toes tapping.
Choral pieces by
Carl Friedrich Zöllner (1800–1860)
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809–1847)
Robert Schumann (1810–1856)
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839–1901)
Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)
Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
i. a.
Afterwards:
Party for teenagers, young adults and the young at heart, with choral and dance music.
Maximilian Walch | DJ
Oberösterreichischer Landesjugendchor
Zhaniya Pohn | Piano
Alexander Koller | Musical director