Our history

St. Ladislaus Choir was established around 1979. Originally it was a group of enthusiastic young people who sang by holy mass in Rajec with the guitar or accordion.

After the end of the Soviet regime in 1989, the choir continually grew and gained new members. It started to sing not only in Rajec but also in other towns. The repertoire was changing as well: while from the beginning the choir used to sing mostly adapted youth songs, later many authors' songs were added up. In 1992 the choir recorded its first audio cassette called We Want to Come to You. As the choir was nameless up to then, the members created its name - St. Ladislaus Choir - after patron the saint of the town and parish Rajec. With the conductor Martina Pekarikova the choir won the gold medal in an international choir competition in Epe, Netherlands. Four years later the choir produced the second audio cassette called Present Everywhere.

Choir members created a community of friends who liked to gather not just by choir practicing but also outside the choir - on trips, holidays, BBQs... So it was nothing strange that many members found their life partners within the choir. And while in the youth era getting married and starting a family was the typical reason to leave the choir, a lot of the members who left before started - when the children grew up a little - to come back to the choir; so the choir transformed step by step into a SATB mixed voiced church choir where the parents sing together with their (almost) adult children. Nowadays the choir has about 30 members aged 15 to 65 years.

At the conductor post, Martina Pekarikova was replaced by Ľubica Mieresová and then her sister Eva Mieresová - Kyšková. With her the choir recorded CDs It is Me (2002), the Christmas CD Love Has Come to the World (2009), the non-public Be Blessed (2015), and its last CD from April 2018 called simply The Concert in Rajecke Teplice.

With professional conductors, the choir is constantly growing in quality - from former two-voiced singing we continually shifted to four-voiced standard; we even sing some songs in seven voices. We cooperate with professional musicians - organists Marek Dietrich and Kristián Tichák, violinists Mária Rybár Fuchsbergerová, Marián Štúň, Veronika Mihalcová, and others; violist Petra Bubelínyová and many others. In the last years, we performed in Rome, Vienna, Paris, Budapest, and also in festivals, e.g. Žilina Voce Magna International Festival and Competition of Choral Art where we won the silver medal in 2021. In 2015 we won a silver medal as well in the Slovak national competition of adult choirs in Košice.