Founded in 1932, the Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir is the oldest and largest children’s concert choir in the Czech Republic. This award-winning ensemble has been a staple of Czech radio broadcasts, orchestral performances, and opera and theatre productions for close to a century. Like the Latvian Radio Choir (coming to Duke Chapel on November 15), the Prague Philharmonic Children’s Choir is a beloved choral institution in the Central and Eastern European tradition and one of its country’s most prized cultural exports.

In the soaring and contemplative space of Duke Chapel, the forty-five member ensemble — selected from the 900 children in the choir’s training program — sings a program of sacred music from the renaissance to the present. The concert includes Victoria’s intricate polyphonic rendering of a plainchant Ave Maria, and continues in a Marian vein with Czech composer Jan Novák’s Ave Maria; Schubert’s Salve Regina; Carl Maria von Weber’s Maria Wiegenlied; and Ivan Kurz’s Maria, Mater Nostra. Among the living Czech composers on the program is Slavomír Hořínka, whose Laudate Dominum is beautifully evocative of ancient liturgical chant.

Jan Campanus Vodňanský: Rorando coeli

Jacobus Handl Gallus: Pueri Concinite

Tomaso Ludovico da Vittoria: Ave Maria

Orlando di Lasso: Ola, che bon eccho

Randall Thompson: Alleluia

Slavomír Hořínka: Laudate Dominum and Domine, non est exaltatum

Ivan Kurz: Maria, Mater nostra

Leonard Bernstein : Gloria Tibi

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy: Veni, Domine and Laudate pueri

Gabriel Fauré: Tantum ergo

Antonín Dvořák: Ave Maria

Jan Novák: Gloria and Ave Maria

Francis Poulenc: Ave Verum Corpus

Arvo Pärt: Peace Upon You, Jerusalem and Zwei Beter