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The choir's "Friday Afternoon" concerts have become tradition. This fall, Manolo Cagnin and his choir serve up a smorgasbord of music from the Middle Ages to now, with Marian motets, animal sounds from the Renaissance, a tango, and some pop music. They join forces with the choir's own Schubertakademie Orchestra to performs works by Purcell, Ferdinand (not Franz!) Schubert, Joseph Eybler, and various members of the Strauss dynasty.

On 18 October, the Vienna Boys Choir begins its traditional fall tour of the United States. This year's programme, "Journey through the Americas", offers music by Copland, Bernstein, and Gershwin, film music from Walt Disney's "The Jungle Book" and from "Sister Act II - Back in the Habit", as well as baroque compositions from New Spain, three songs of the Amazonian Krao Indios, and a spirit dance song of the Arapaho Nation. Of course, there will be some Classical European music as well as waltzes and polkas of the Strauss dynasty.

The boys will travel through 18 states: Arkansas, Connecticut, die beiden Carolinas, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachussetts, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont,Virginia, West Virginia. En route, they will perform 43 concerts between Barre, Vermont, and Nacogdoches, Texas. The biggest cities on the tour are New York City, where they sing in Carnegie Hall, Chicago (Symphony Hall), Philadelphia (Verizon Hall), San Antonio, Dallas, and Nashville. Rodion, 12, and Gabriel, 11, are looking forward to exploring the cities; they are looking forward to cheesecake and baseball, musicals and films, to skating, to American pancakes and football, to Philly cheese steak and ice hockey, to visiting Miracle Mile, Liberty Bell, and Central Park, among other things. They really want to see the famous skyscrapers - and they have done their research. Online of course.

> Tour roster

From 23 October to 2 November, the Vienna Boys Choir is set to tour India, with concerts scheduled in Delhi and Mumbai. They first travelled to India in 1961. This is their seventh visit to the subcontinent, their first official tour since 2004. Boys from the choir visited India to film sequences for Curt Faudon's films "Silk Road" and "Bridging the Gap".

The Choir's programme, compiled for this year's tour, comprises pieces telling of its historic roots, with compositions written especially for the imperial choir from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, as well as classical favourites by Mozart, Rossini, and Schumann. In addition, the choir will sing Viennese waltzes and polkas by Johann and Josef Strauss, cheerful music for which they are justly world-famous.

The second part of their programme offers a whole host of Indian connections. Heinrich Heine penned his poem „On Wings of Song“ in 1827, the year in which Jayadeva's Gitagovinda received its first accurate German translation. All of Europe had developed a passion and a longing for India, which Mendelssohn captured in music. To complete their passage to India, the boys have learned two very special pieces: Man kunto maula by the father of qawwali, Amir Khusrow (1253 - 1325), and the famous bhajan Raghupati Raghav Raja Ram, set by Vishnu Digambar Paluskar (1872 - 1931), founder of the Gandharva Mahavidyalaya music school, and sung by Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948) during the Salt March in 1930. „These pieces have the most amazing rhythm,“, says Steven, one of the boys in the choir, „There is an incredible energy when you sing them.“

And in their free time? What will the boys do in India? For most of them, it will be their first time in the country. They want to see temples, explore a bazaar or two, buy gifts for their families at home, and have lots of Indian food. And they are looking forward to meeting a not-so-old colleague, Rishan, a fourteen-year-old from Gurgaon, who sang with them for four years and graduated from the Vienna Boys Choir this summer.