THE 24-strong Vienna Boys’ Choir is heading here with a special gift for Australia – the premiere of a newly-commissioned Australian work by composer Elena Kats-Chernin based on Dorothea Mackellar’s poem, “My Country”.

Kats-Chernin travelled to Vienna to rehearse with the boys.

“I love the clarity and agility of those voices,” she says. “They can be bird-like as well as earthy, depending on the registers and there is much vocal colour to inspire a composer.”

The choir is unbelievably busy, performing more than 300 concerts a year and also providing music for the Sunday Mass in Vienna’s Imperial Chapel, just as it has done since 1498.

“We haven’t been here for a long time, I thought we should do something for Australia,” the choir’s artistic agent Peter Bruckner (who also handles the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra) tells “CityNews”.

Twenty-four is the normal size for the 500-year-old choir, Bruckner says, explaining the rigorous annual audition process – “you’d be one of the lucky ones if you got in” – made necessary annually because voices are regularly breaking with choristers aged 9 to 15.

Is it a total disaster if your voice breaks? Well, not really, Bruckner tells me. They used to get thrown out of the Vienna Boys’ Choir School, but now they can stay to complete their secondary training, then do anything else they like – “like a regular school”.

Not exactly regular. These young singers have no school while they travel as the schedule of travel, rehearsals and concerts is too exhausting. That means, Bruckner says, that when they get back to Vienna, studying is super-intensive.

So, what will we hear when they come to Canberra? The first half of the program is determinedly classical, dominated by the great Austrians such as Mozart and Schubert, but the second half is a little more freewheeling, with local songs, even in China and Korea, to make people feel relaxed.

Another big change is that these days the choir is very multicultural, “we have to adopt the modern way”, Bruckner says. “It’s good to be multicultural from the inside; it opens up the mind and the voice.”

The Vienna Boys’ Choir, at The Llewellyn Hall, September 16, bookings to premier.ticketek.com.au/shows/show.aspx?sh=VIENNABO12