Almost half a century has passed since the Vienna Boys’ Choir appeared in their previous feature film, Disney’s Almost Angels of 1961. This latest offering – a whimsical travelogue directed by Curt Faudon – prompts the immediate question upon viewing: why? For whom is the film intended? A recruitment tool? Surely not. Passengers on long-haul flights? Probably. For serious music lovers? Definitely not, alas.

Still, it gives the film-makers opportunities galore to dwell upon palatial Habsburgian Rococo architectural details and cute, blue-eyed, sailor-suited (and, in a historically corny episode, periwigged) Knaben. When they occasionally pause from their exhausting globetrotting the history of the choir is retold. We see the eager Wunderkinde of the “Schubert” Choir (one of four ensembles) in rehearsal with their Peruvian director, Andy Icochea Icochea, gently larking around, practising Chopin on Ravel’s grand piano and playing in a samba band, and hear frank insights from the boys themselves.

The DVD’s soundtrack was inspired by the choir’s opera Silk Road and it purports to have excavated several songs from the old trading routes. We hear music sung in Latin, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Marathi, Maori, Savo Finnish, Tajik, Uyghur and Urdu. The film also features a Pakistani qawwali, a rain dance from Uzbekistan, a bhajan from India and field-hollers from Tajikistan.

The treatment of the European repertory (from Josquin via Strauss to Orff) will horrify any musical purist. The “Domine Deus” from Vivaldi’s Gloria is “enhanced” by a bizarre Larkford to Cranford-type tinkling piano sub-track. Frankly it is quite nauseating. Nor is the singing terribly good, with some curiously mangled Latin vowels and dodgy intonation. Mercifully, a couple of songs from Schubert’s Winterreise are left well alone – just! Gerd Schuller is credited as being responsible for this musical mish-mash. The “Dies irae” from Mozart’s Requiem (used in the final sequence) receives perhaps the most offensively sacrilegious treatment as an accompaniment to some CGI-enhanced footage of the Terracotta Army.

The “film within a film” concept is largely an irrelevance and the almost continuous voiceovers ruin what few chances there are to concentrate on the music. One to be avoided.