Composer to lead Cinc’y festival
OrchestrasThe Cincinnati May Festival, which has been running for 151 years, has chosen Pulitzer-winning composer Julia Wolfe to be this year’s director.
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.
My wife and I lived in Cincinnati many years ago and still try to coordinate occasional visits there with a Symphony concert or the May Festival.
The Festival had its roots in the 1870s community sings of the city’s then-substantial German immigrant population, and was one of the reasons for the construction of Cincinnati Music Hall, now home not only to the Festival but also to Symphony, Pops, Opera, and Ballet. (The main historically German neighborhood, where Music Hall was built, was then separated from the rest of the town center by a canal and was, and still is, named “Over the Rhine.”)
Because of its roots, the Festival has always emphasized works with substantial choral components and has described itself as “the oldest continuing choral festival in the Western Hemisphere.” Repertoire could include oratorios (Bach, Handel, later); requiems and masses; symphonic works with major chorus work (Beethoven 9, Mahler 2 and 8); concert performances of chorus-heavy operatic scenes; or newly commissioned works. Any solo singers are professionals, and the Cincinnati Symphony is the orchestra, but the choruses are expertly trained community groups. (While still a student, I myself once sang in the chorus for Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms.”) And each year’s final performance always ends with an all-audience sing-along of the Hallelujah Chorus. Great fun.
Too bad they couldn’t get someone with a little less representation and a little more talent.