Music in Salzburg (with teens)

Haven’t been there (yet), as I am visiting in December, but there are Mozart dinner concerts at St Peter’s, which feature musical interludes between dinner courses. They’re highly rated. If you click on the search box on this forum in the upper left and enter Salzburg concerts you will see a lot of previous forum info on this topic.

The Mozart dinner concert is fairly touristy. Since your boys are musicians I would see if there will be a concert at Mirabell Palace while there. We have been to the Mozart dinner concert twice and I enjoyed both times. We went to a violin concert at Mirabell and thoroughly enjoyed it! We had our 11 y/o with us and it was not too long for him to lose interest. He still remembers it.

We did the Mozart dinner concert on Easter this year with our boys-ages 15 and 11. They both really enjoyed it. A course is served, then there is about 20 minutes of music repeated twice, plus the strings play a selection with no vocals.. It is 4-5 string musicians and 2 singers. They do a selection of works from Mozart operas Don Giovanni, Magic Flute, & Marriage of Figaro. We don't speak a word of Italian (or German, in the case of The Magic Flute), but the singers were true performers and had quite a bit of audience interaction, so it was enjoyable for all. We thought the food was good, too. I think my boys enjoyed it more than they would have a straight concert since the "culture" was in short blasts and good food was interspersed. Total time was around 2 hours. It was not a cheap experience but you can get a discount with the Salzburg card. I bought the tickets online before we left.

We went to a concert at the Mirabell Palace, a string quartet joined by an oboe for a few pieces I believe. The setting was beautiful, the music of good quality, and the crowd mixed, although probably mostly tourists. But as I said, the music was good quality -- It was a concert that could be attended by anyone, and was not just "Mozart's greatest hits." I would think your boys would enjoy it, whatever the group is that is playing when you are there.

The Mozarteum offers non-touristy performances. Here is the June schedule. The Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra performance is perhaps most likely to be of interest. The first two pieces are quick (around 20 minutes) but Mahler's Symphony No 9 is about 80 minutes.

"Beautiful surroundings"? Here is a link to view the hall where the performance is done.

Thank you all for the suggestions, links and pictures. I think we’ll go to the Mozarteum. We actually ran into someone in our town who studied there. Small world. He raved about it, so we’ll check it out.