BC Choirs to Take their Voices to Europe

The Bluefield College Variations chamber singers and Masterworks Chorale are going on a European choir tour, July 2-11, 2019.

The tour will start in Austria, where the BC choirs will join other choirs from across North America in performing at the Salzburg Choral Festival. The BC choirs will then travel to the Melk Abbey in lower Austria before visiting Vienna, the Esterhazy Palace in Austria, and Budapest, the capital of Hungary.

“The idea of going on this tour is partly to help the college become more visible in the musical world,” said Dr. John Moir, assistant professor of music who will be directing the choirs on tour, “to enable the singers in both Masterworks Chorale and those students that are going on the trip to see the places where some of this music may have been written.”

During their tour of Salzburg, the BC choirs will be performing Mozart’s “Coronation Mass” in the Salzburger Dom, also known as the Salzburg Cathedral, the place where Mozart wrote this work and was Kapellmeister (a leader of a chamber ensemble) in his day.

The groups will also be singing in Melk Abby, which is a working monastery on the Danube River, before performing concerts in Vienna and Esterhazy Palace, where Franz Joseph Haydn’s worked on his music. The tour will also include sightseeing in Vienna and Budapest and at places such as Mozart’s birthplace and sites that were featured in The Sound of Music.

“While there is no specific missionary aspect to our tour, we consider it a ministry, simply because we’ll be singing for people many sacred music pieces,” said Dr. Moir. “But the choirs are there primarily to be on tour, to let people hear what a small Christian college in the mountains of Appalachia can do with this glorious music when we’re given the chance. I’m sure we’ll all come home transformed by this once-in-a-lifetime experience.”