Vocal Music by Olivier Messiaen (1908 - 1992)
Danish National Concert Choir
Choir
The Danish National Concert Choir is a professional Danish choir with a total of 74 singers. The history of the choir goes back to 1932, when it made its debut with performances of Verdi's Requiem, and since then it has won great international recognition in more or less all classical genres and epochs.
The core of the Danish National Concert Choir is the Danish National Vocal Ensemble, which has functioned as an independent elite choir since 2009.
Alongside the Classical-Romantic concert repertoire for choir and orchestra, contemporary music has always been conspicuously profiled by the Danish National Concert Choir. Among other works Per Nørgård's Symphony no. 3 was written for the choir, as were works by Henze, Stockhausen, Sandström, Ligeti, Berio, Penderecki and MacMillan.
The Danish National Concert Choir has sung with most of the Danish orchestras, and throughout all the years its regular partner has been the Danish National Symphony Orchestra in the DR Thursday Concerts. Besides DR's own ensembles the choir also collaborates with the Tivoli Symphony Orchestra (Copenhagen Philharmonic), Concerto Copenhagen and others.
The choir has visited the USA, the BBC Proms in London, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Présence Festival in Paris, the Salzburg Festival, the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and the Berlin Philharmonia, as well as collaborating regularly with other Danish symphony orchestras and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra.
On CD the choir can be heard in among other works Mahler's Eighth Symphony, Brahms' Requiem, Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky, Rakhmaninov's The Bells, Janacek's Glagolitic Mass, Per Nørgård's Third Symphony, choral works by Carl Nielsen and Ruud Langgaard's Music of the Spheres.
In recent years the Concert Choir has also made its mark with a number of CD releases. From 1989 until 2002, when Stefan Parkman was chief conductor, the choir had an exclusive agreement with the English recording label Chandos and recorded about 50 CDs, both in collaboration with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and a cappella.
Since 2010 Florian Helgath has been the regular choirmaster of the Danish National Concert Choir.