Cincinnati May Festival Unveils New Artistic Leadership Model And 2024 Schedule

Following a monumental 150th anniversary celebration and as part of its vision to become the most exciting force in the choral world, the Cincinnati May Festival has announced Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Julia Wolfe as the May Festival's inaugural Festival Director. Inspired by Wolfe's body of work for chorus and orchestra, as well as decades-long collaborations with composers and performers across genres and media, the 2024 May Festival will feature the world premiere of All that breathes, a new choral fanfare that Wolfe composed especially for the Festival, alongside her compositions Her Story, Anthracite Fields and Pretty; works by her longtime collaborators and Bang on a Can co-founders Michael Gordon and David Lang; as well as treasured works from the repertoire. The May Festival Chorus (Robert Porco, director) and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (Louis Langrée, music director) will be conducted by Teddy Abrams, Stephanie Childress, François López-Ferrer and Robert Porco. Featured guests will include soprano Camilla Tilling, tenor Nicholas Phan, and ensembles Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Lorelei Ensemble (Beth Willer, artistic director), the Steiger Butte Singers of Chiloquin, Oregon and the May Festival Youth Chorus (Matthew Swanson, director). The May Festival will also pay tribute to Porco's 35-year tenure as Director of Choruses with a community celebration of food and music at Bob's Big Sing: A May Festival Reunion on March 23 at Music Hall.

New Artistic Model

“The May Festival has evolved through many changes and adjustments over 150 years into its current iteration, but one thing that has never wavered is its artistic excellence and commitment to the choral repertoire,” said May Festival Executive Director Steven Sunderman. “This new artistic model embraces our traditions and advances our vision. It combines acclaimed artists from all disciplines who are at the top of their craft with the talents of the May Festival Chorus and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to create new and exciting experiences for all. This new artistic model will build upon the legacy and success of the May Festival, and we are thrilled that Julia Wolfe will join us as our first-ever Festival Director.”

The new artistic leadership model aims to invigorate all aspects of artistic planning and preparation through the close collaboration between two artistic leads: an annual Festival Director and the May Festival Director of Choruses. A new Festival Director, drawn from a variety of artistic disciplines, will be engaged each year to offer fresh perspectives and experiences that infuse the Festival with artistic innovation and exciting new collaborations.

Julia Wolfe will serve as the inaugural Festival Director for the 2024 May Festival. In this newly created role, Wolfe draws upon decades of collaboration and interdisciplinary artistry to devise a program that exhibits the full breadth of the chorus as a musical medium. Through several contemporary works that highlight the chorus—including three vocal works of her own—Wolfe exposes common ground with the May Festival's celebrated classical offerings, creating contrasts and unexpected synergies that resonate across centuries of musical history.

“I am thrilled to be working with the forward-looking May Festival Chorus and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra to bring powerful musical narratives to the historic May Festival,” said Festival Director Julia Wolfe. “Pairing new with old, the works resonate together across time and space to share the powerful vehicle of music—expressing who we were and who we are today.”

“I love Julia's music. It is imaginative, interesting and eclectic,” said May Festival Director of Choruses Robert Porco. “I was particularly drawn to her piece Anthracite Fields, since my father worked in the steel mills for 41 years. The quotes within the piece drawn from people who worked in the coal mines resonated with me. Her music is fascinating and extraordinary, and I look forward to sharing it with everyone here in Cincinnati.”

Sunderman added, “Our vision here at the May Festival is to become the most exciting force in the choral world. Julia Wolfe is a prolific composer with a substantial body of work for full orchestra and chorus. Her music includes theatrical and multimedia elements that are integral to her works, and she expertly uses the artform to tell relevant stories on a variety of subjects. Julia's achievements are unique, and as the May Festival lays the foundation for its next 150 years, Julia is the perfect person to serve as our inaugural Festival Director in this new model.”

2024 May Festival

The 2024 May Festival begins on Friday, May 17 with Director of Choruses Robert Porco leading the May Festival Chorus and Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) in Franz Joseph Haydn's oratorio The Creation, which depicts the creation of the world, with text drawn from the Book of Genesis, the Book of Psalms and John Milton's Paradise Lost. Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling and Grammy-nominated tenor Nicholas Phan join the Chorus and Orchestra for this performance of one of Haydn's greatest masterpieces.

On Saturday, May 18, Franco-British conductor Stephanie Childress makes her May Festival debut in a program inspired by the power of anthems, with music by Wolfe, her Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The concert opens with the world premiere of Wolfe's All that breathes, a new work commissioned by the May Festival that embraces the massive sound of collective breath and exhalation. Then, the string section of the CSO joins the May Festival Chorus for the United States premiere of Lang's 2023 orchestral version of the national anthems, for which the composer compiled lines and concepts from all of the world's national anthems to find one major commonality: a desire for freedom, and fear of the ease by which it can be lost. The CSO is then featured in Wolfe's Pretty. Drawing upon Wolfe's lifelong affinity for folk and rock music and decades of musical experimentation, Pretty explores the concept of “prettiness” and its historical relationship with womanhood, and complicates that with a nod to the word's Old English meaning of cunning, crafty or clever. The result: a raw and raucous anthem of work rhythms, thwarting notions of what pretty can mean. The Chorus, joined by the May Festival Youth Chorus, returns for Ralph Vaughan Williams' plea for peace in his Dona nobis pacem, written in the years leading up to World War II, with text from a collection of poetry by Walt Whitman, the Latin Mass and more.

The following week on Thursday, May 23, conductor Teddy Abrams leads a program that reflects both the beauty of the natural world in Wolfe's long-time collaborator and fellow Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon's Natural History as well as the fraught relationship of industry and the environment in Wolfe's 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning piece Anthracite Fields. Inspired by Crater Lake National Park in Oregon, National History was composed in close collaboration with the Steiger Butte Singers—an extended family of performers and singers from Chiloquin, Oregon—in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service. Drawing upon the Steiger Butte Singers' musical and cultural contributions, as well as Gordon's own explorations of the lake's ecology and history, Natural History reflects on both the unique American relationship with nature (through the words of Henry David Thoreau) and the artistic and cultural heritage of the people who have stewarded the land for millennia.  Steiger Butte Singers, who sing and play together in a circle around a large ceremonial Klamath drum, appear as soloists in the piece alongside the May Festival Chorus, CSO, and 30 brass players and percussionists who are spatially located throughout the hall.

The program continues with Wolfe's 2015 oratorio Anthracite Fields, which honors the workers of the Pennsylvania Anthracite coal region at a time when the industry fueled the nation, and the complicated legacy of the industry and its toll on the workers and environment. The piece consists of five movements, each based on a source text describing a way the coal industry affected life in America on a local and national scale. The Los Angeles Times wrote that the work “captures not only the sadness of hard lives lost…but also of the sweetness and passion of a way of daily life now also lost. The music compels without overstatement. This is a major, profound work.” Anthracite Fields features the May Festival Chorus, who are joined by the Bang on a Can All-Stars—a legendary ensemble hailed as “a flexible and expert sextet” (The New York Times).

The 2024 May Festival culminates on Saturday, May 25 with Wolfe's oratorio Her Story and Gabriel Fauré's Requiem led by François López-Ferrer, former Associate Conductor of the CSO and May Festival. Premiered in 2022 to critical acclaim, Her Story invokes the words of historical figures and the spirit of pivotal moments to pay tribute to the centuries of ongoing struggle for equal rights, representation and access to democracy for women in America. The piece incorporates text from throughout history of women's fight for equality, ranging from a letter written by Abigail Adams to words attributed to Sojourner Truth, from public attacks directed at women protesting for the right to vote to political satire. The dynamic vocal artists of the all-female Lorelei Ensemble join the CSO for this immersive and visual presentation with staging by Anne Kauffman. The program concludes with Fauré's Requiem, which depicts death as a peaceful and glorious transcendence into everlasting paradise.

“This is an exciting moment in the May Festival's legacy,” said May Festival Board Chair Christy Horan. “On behalf of the Board of Directors, we share our thanks to the May Festival Artistic Advisory Committee for thoughtfully shaping the future of May Festival artistic leadership and for selecting Julia Wolfe as our inaugural Festival Director. While choral music will always remain at the heart of the Cincinnati May Festival, we look forward to the fresh perspectives and ideas from Julia and future Festival Directors that will enable the May Festival to share the power of music, as well as the stories told through music, in compelling and memorable ways.”

Bob's Big Sing: A May Festival Reunion

In addition to performances in May, the May Festival will celebrate Robert Porco's birthday and 35-year tenure as Director of Choruses at Bob's Big Sing: A May Festival Reunion on Saturday, March 23 from 12 p.m. to 5 p.m. Porco is the longest-tenured Director of Choruses in the history of the May Festival. By the end of the 2024 season, he will have worked with more than 1,300 individual singers of the May Festival Chorus and prepared 539 distinct choral works, spanning an enormous range of repertoire, for 174 May Festival concerts, 27 of which Porco conducted. In addition to the May Festival, Porco will have prepared the Chorus for 132 concerts with the CSO and Cincinnati Pops during the Orchestra's subscription seasons and summer performances at Riverbend Music Center. All are welcome to participate in this special gathering that includes an Italian-themed meal in the Music Hall Ballroom—a nod to Porco's Italian roots—followed by an informal rehearsal in Springer Auditorium.

“I look forward to seeing everyone at the celebration in March to sing through excerpts from major choral works,” said Porco. “And, I promise not to stop at every measure!”

"We extend our deep gratitude to Bob Porco for his extraordinary service to the May Festival as Director of Choruss," said Sunderman. "And we look forward to honoring him the best way we know how—through food and music!"

Tickets

Subscription ticket packages for the 2024 May Festival and Bob's Big Sing: A May Festival Reunion are currently on sale. All other individual tickets go on sale on February 27, 2024. Tickets may be purchased by visiting mayfestival.com, calling the Box Office at 513.381.3300 or visiting the Music Hall Box Office at 1241 Elm Street, Monday through Friday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

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