Escolania de Montserrat

Within the glorious acoustic setting of the Adelaide Town Hall, this all-boys choir completely captivated the full house at their opening night performance. 

Presently the school of fifty boys aged between nine and fourteen years old (although only 30 were on stage last night) live and perform in a Benedictine Abbey in Catalonia, Spain.  The Abbey congregation astonishingly celebrates their first millennium in 2025 and the choir is estimated to have been in existence for around seven hundred years; the first written records of its existence appeared in 1307, pre-dating the more widely known Vienna Boys Choir established in 1498.

In his heartfelt introduction Father Efrén de Montellà, a Benedictine monk from the Abbey, explained that the boys sing twice each day in the Basillica of Santa Maria de Montserrat every day of the year. They travel only occasionally but tourists flock to the area 60km north of Barcelona to experience the choir and the Abbey’s rich history of survival through the Napoleonic Wars and the Spanish Civil War.  The boys are educated at the monastery school each morning with the afternoons dedicated to music studies. Much of their song catalogue resides in the religious realm but also includes Catalan folk music.

In 2020 the BBC’s classical music review named the Escolania de Montserrat one of the 10 best choirs in the world. Witnessing the performance led by their precise, passionate conductor and director Llorenç Castelló, himself a graduate of the Escolania, it is understandable.  Equally impressive is accompanist Mercé Sanchis.  With degrees in piano, organ, and chamber music from the Barcelona Superior Conservatory of Music, Sanchis played both the Town Hall’s impressive built in organ and the piano with passion and total focus. Interestingly, the piano was too loud for one song toward the end of the programme but elsewhere the balance was exceptional.

Naturally it is the vocals that shine in this concert, no matter the musical style.  The voices of the young trebles soared effortlessly and were simply thrilling.  The harmony, rhythms, pitch, and dynamics of this choir are beyond remarkable and often, there was that heightened moment of awed, appreciative silence at the end of a piece as the reverberance settled and just prior to the applause bursting forth.  The other young voices in lower registers were also beautiful, a counterpoint adding depth and a lush resonance.  Amidst all the aural perfection, it was delightful to appreciate that these choristers are still young boys; there was the occasional nose scratch, glasses adjustment, and hilariously one boy felt the need to tweak his impressive mop of gelled fringe in between songs.  A friend had witnessed the choir members the previous day taking in some Adelaide sights with requisite excited photo opportunities and exhibiting all their youthful boy-energies. 

But oh!, the music and the voices.  One favourite was the 14th century Inperayritz from Llibre Vermell (The Red Book), a polyphonic motet praising the figure of the Virgin Mary, although it is difficult to forget the version by the Hespèrion XX ensemble who have also graced the Adelaide Festival previously.  Included were Gregorian pieces, a Cappella songs, works composed by previous members or leaders of the Escolania, and the finale: three songs from El Bestiolari by Albert Guinovart (b. 1962), playful poems set to music and dedicated to the common spider, the nightingale and the common chiffchaff.  The highlight though was the moment the group filed to the sides of the auditorium, apart from four trebles who remained on stage.  This song reduced me to tears from the sheer beauty of the moment, the aural ecstasy, and the reverence of the experience - to the extent that I lost my place in the programme and to my shame, cannot recall the name of the piece.

Bravo Adelaide Festival for the addition of Escolania de Montserrat to the 2023 line-up.

Lisa Lanzi

Photographer: Russell Millard

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