The Ecumenical Youth Choir Grossenhain

In January 2007, Stefan Jaenke, a self-employed composer and musician, started rehearsing with a group of 30 singers. Stefan's idea of a project choir for Sri Lanka had been born a year before after his visit to the opening ceremony of the S.P.C. Grossenhain Counselling Centre in Negombo, where he performed together with another small choir.

All the singers - the youngest ones are 13 - come from the area around Grossenhain, a small town near Dresden in the south-eastern part of Germany. The people of Grossenhain have a special connection to Sri Lanka, since they had started a campaign to finance the building of the S.P.C. Grossenhain Counselling Centre in Negombo after the tsunami catastrophe in 2004.

The programme that was put together reflects some European music history: from spiritual works of Heinrich Schuetz (17th century) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (18th century) and Charles Gounod (19th century) the listeners are led through the world of German folk songs to contemporary spiritual works, partly composed or rearranged by Stefan Jaenke himself.

The choir sings in Latin, German and English, and they have also included a couple of Sinhala songs written by Father Terrence Perera from the S.P.C. Grossenhain Counselling Centre in Negombo.