The chamber choir

The chamber choir was set up by Kurt Thomas, one of HfM’s legendary founders and an internationally renowned choral conductor, who was responsible for many highly regarded performances and a standard work on choral conducting. Under his pupil and successor Alexander Wagner, the ensemble held a large number of extremely successful concerts in Germany and abroad, many of them recorded for radio broadcasts and as CDs. Wagner was followed by Fritz ter Wey, a professor of choral conducting who placed a particular emphasis on contemporary music performance. During his tenure, the choir won several competitions in other European countries, worked with guest conductors such as Erik Erikson and Paul van Nevel, and cooperated for an extended period on church music performances with Georg Christoph Biller. The chamber choir, a 36-strong auditioned ensemble, performs demanding repertoire from the renaissance to the modern periods. It places a special focus on 19th- to 21st-century a cappella, and on orchestra-accompanied works from a variety of eras. Students of school and church music and singing, and vocally gifted Tonmeister and orchestral musicians, attend regular weekly and one-off rehearsals. They seek to produce artistically sophisticated and stylistically confident interpretations of the repertoire, and to develop a brilliant and homogeneous choral sound. In 2014 the choir and Prof. Anne Kohler, its conductor since the 2009 summer semester, won joint first prize in the “mixed choirs of more than 32 singers” category of the Deutscher Chorwettbewerb. Click here for the chamber choir’s website.