KorMalta, Malta’s National Choir, is an initiative of Arts Council Malta, within the Ministry for Justice, Culture and Local Government. KorMalta was set up towards the end of 2018 as Malta’s National Choir with the aim of training choristers professionally and have them perform diverse repertoire from early music to opera and contemporary compositions. Receiving training on particular repertoire by specialists in the field is key to this professional development. 

Biber’s Requiem in F minor was a 2019/2020 project by KorMalta and ViBE (an initiative of Teatru Manoel) in collaboration with the Valletta Cultural Agency. This project provided a vehicle for training and collaboration for the KorMalta singers and the ViBE instrumentalists as well as the involvement of the Valletta community and was the first-ever collaboration between KorMalta and VIBE. This collaboration proved very positive for both entities and will be carried into the next musical season.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s music, although an absolutely divine example of Baroque music, cropped up only rarely in programmes. Occasionally, a violinist would play one of his sonatas, as the Bohemian-born Biber was one of the great violin virtuosos of his day. But the larger-scale music of one of Mozart's most significant predecessors as Kapellmeister to the court of the Archbishop of Salzburg (a post-Biber held from 1684 until he died in 1704) went almost entirely unperformed. The Requiem is an intensely arresting work. It is conceived on a grand scale, with the voices supported by a six-part ensemble of strings and a trio of trombones that conjure up sonorities ideally suited to the spaces of Salzburg Cathedral, where it was probably first performed. More significantly, the vocal writing itself carries a much greater expressive weight.

KorMalta’s and VIBE’s Biber project created many parallel pathways of collaboration and training between different parties such as VIBE musicians and foreign Baroque specialist instrumentalists and KorMalta singers and professional foreign singers specialised in Baroque technique.

It also saw the collaboration between musicians and the local community through workshops in schools and youths from band clubs in Valletta and other villages. The workshops were based on familiarising children, youths and band club musicians with Baroque instruments in an interactive manner held in Valletta.

Both entities collaborated with foreign professionals in their own right to develop and implement Biber’s Requiem. The foreign specialists helped in the development through training and workshops and then in the implementation by performing alongside the Maltese musicians during the final performance, which was the 2nd November 2019. The performance fell on the liturgical feast of All Souls, an intrinsic part of the Maltese religious-cultural reality, thus enhancing the experience for the audience members, which complemented the liturgy. The performance was repeated as part of the Valletta Baroque Festival in January 2020 and this sealed the success of the KorMalta-ViBE collaboration.

The below footage was recorded live during KorMalta’s and VIBE’s 2020 participation in the Valletta Baroque Festival, which was shown both on TVM 2 and KorMalta’s Facebook page. 

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did – The KorMalta team.