Completing Cincinnati’s Music Hall in 1878 met important needs in a thriving “singing city,” which needed dedicated spaces to support its many choirs. Work had begun earnestly two years prior, and, by 1878, work had accelerated so the space would be ready in time to host that year’s May Festival. Music Hall has thus always been linked to the May Festival. Yet, as Director of Choruses for the May Festival Matthew Swanson notes, the 2025 edition marks the first time the Festival’s choruses will perform a strictly choral concert in Music Hall as part of the Festival. To be sure, Swanson says, the choruses have long presented chorus-only concerts, including during the Festival and in nearby spaces like Covington’s Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, but never as a Festival program in Music Hall.
Swanson and colleagues Jason Alexander Holmes (Associate Director of Choruses) and Lisa Peters (Artistic Director of the Cincinnati Boychoir) have crafted “Chasing the Dawn: A Choral Journey” to exemplify the full breadth of the Festival’s choral organization. The program includes not only the May Festival Chorus but also the May Festival Chamber Choir, May Festival Youth Chorus and the Cincinnati Boychoir, the latter recently officially allied with the Festival amid the Boychoir’s 60th anniversary. Including both adult and youth choruses honors history; as Swanson details, “There’s almost nothing more foundational to the Festival than involving young people. At the very first May Festival, a chorus of 700 adults was well publicized; also appearing at the Festival was a chorus of 600 schoolchildren. Proceeds from the first May Festival were used to found singing schools.” Indeed, 1897 even saw a Children’s May Festival with performances including more than 2,000 local students, according to reports.
Carefully curated throughlines hold together the concert’s remarkable variety. The program coalesces around light and a day’s progression, partly inspired by 2025 May Festival Director Renée Fleming’s May 22 program, “The Brightness of Light.” The unique atmospheres of each day’s hours transliterate into the program’s musical array and alternation of ensembles. Swanson emphasizes, “It’s a great opportunity for the audience to consider a lot of different musical styles back-to-back. The program is multilingual and quite varied in terms of vocal and instrumental color. The great thing about a theme like light is that any number of pieces could have gone in one of these slots. Everything was chosen for a specific reason.”
The program’s sequencing registers its intention, as Swanson explains: “There’s a great moment where the Chorus has just been singing an expansively textured movement from the Schnittke Concerto for Choir, followed immediately by a very charming work in unison and two parts, sung by the Boychoir trebles. That will be quite a contrast, not only of language and style but also vocal color.” Such moments capture musical variety, reaching across generational lines to do so.
Within its overarching theme, audiences may discover that each selection conveys multiple meanings. Swanson says, “There can be very literal expressions about day and night, and Purcell’s ‘Evening Hymn’ is one of those, but the program also brings up this idea of what we do in those evening times.” What we do also emanates from the important Ghanaian composer Ephraim Amu’s “Asem Yi Di Ka.” This piece conveys the necessity of finishing work, forecasting similar aspirations in the final movement of Schnittke’s Concerto. Swanson encourages careful contemplation of the program’s words, as he says, “I hope people follow the narrative and consider the texts deeply, even after we’ve stopped singing them, because they are works of art in and of themselves. The marriage of the texts with fantastic and compelling music is art on an even higher plane.” Peters echoes this appeal of texted music: “There’s something about people singing together with text, with a message. To allow yourself to be in that story, it’s so powerful.”
Each entire piece holds potential for deep understanding, but in the Youth Chorus’ selection of “Where the Light Begins,” Holmes notes that even single words can provoke: “The young people get the word ‘perhaps’ more in this piece than any other and it offers a bit of tension in the program’s narrative. It’s not just ‘Day — great!’ It’s also, ‘But perhaps we don’t turn to the day. What happens? Where does it actually begin? Does it begin when the light shines or when we turn to it?’ I think it’s good to complicate these narratives.”
The program consciously demonstrates the technical versatility and stylistic range of today’s choral discipline at large. As Holmes puts it, “It’s important that our audience sees the ensembles for who they are.” He continues, “It’s a perfect concert for someone who is new to or curious about choral music or the May Festival organization.”
Foregrounding the program’s repertoire, Swanson says, “It isn’t any accident that this concert features a lot of living composers and pieces of contemporary music. This is a chance to see that the choral art is an evolving and present art, and that these composers are doing what composers have done for centuries, which is taking forms, singing, and song and casting them in new lights. Abbie Betinis’ ‘Lumen’ is a fantastic example. Her signature harmonic style brings a piquant quality to the classic form of a canon.”
Among the concert’s exceptional dimensions is its confidence in intergenerational relationships. Cultural activities rarely involve the age range that will appear on this stage, and continuities within and between the ensembles run deep. Many members of the May Festival Chorus sang in the Youth Chorus, and some sang in the Boychoir. For Holmes, maturity and artistic growth go hand in hand: “The teacher in me always gets excited when audiences see the progression from knowing things to knowing more things and then knowing a whole bunch of things.”
He highlights that pieces like “Lumen,” Sarah Quartel’s “Bird’s Lullaby,” and Shayla Blake and Patricia Mock’s “Bring Your Dreams Along” develop singers’ musicianship. The latter piece inspired important breakthroughs for the Boychoir in the past year, recalls Holmes: “This was one of the first pieces that the Boychoir treble singers put together in fall 2024. There’s something special when children master part-singing, even in just two parts — their eyes get really big and really excited because it’s this new thing.”
As Peters relates, the choice for the youth to sing on the same stage as adults is valuable: “There’s a whole piece of it for the younger singers who get to be there and have that high level professional experience. It helps the audience and the youth singers see that singing is a lifelong thing that brings you joy.” She suggests that children’s choral performance also offers a vivid affirmation: “Positivity and hopefulness; you see them and you think, ‘You know what, it’s going to be okay down the road.’”
From the opening arrangement of “This Little Light of Mine,” the notion of human connection and community are never far from mind. As Swanson notes: “This is a welcoming gesture to get everybody in the room excited and feeling familiar with the Chorus and one another.”
For this program, the Festival commissioned composer David von Kampen to compose a new arrangement of the Appalachian folk song “Every Night When the Sun Goes In.” As Swanson describes it, the song symbolizes links between Cincinnati’s musical traditions and its regional neighbors: “Cincinnati is at a geographic crossroads between Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky, and a regional crossroads of the American Midwest, South and Appalachia. Appalachian folk traditions are very much alive in this area, and this is a great way to celebrate that.” The Boychoir’s presence in the program represents the city, as well; as Peters observes, many alumni still live locally and still sing in choruses.
Holmes’ choice of “Asem Yi Di Ka” was geared toward teaching the May Festival Youth Chorus about the value of community-minded initiative, its text asking, “If not me, then who will take charge?” Holmes reflects, “I’m sensitive to the fact that the young people in the Youth Chorus are at a really impressionable time where they’re figuring out at least the first version of who they want to be. I take seriously this message of individual responsibility for the greater good.”
Peters regularly reminds her singers about choral singing’s impacts: “We’re making this magical thing happen where people come together and it’s greater than each individual person. I’ll say, ‘What a great rehearsal we had today; we just moved the world forward. It’s in a better place because we did this thing together.’”
The program evinces community in more precise ways, as well. “Hymn to the Eternal Flame” from Stephen Paulus’ To Be Certain of the Dawn ruminates on inter-community reconciliation. The Minnesota Orchestra and the Minneapolis Basilica of Saint Mary commissioned the work, commemorating World War II’s end and the Vatican’s 1965 Nostra aetate, which apologized to the Jewish community for the Church’s role in antisemitism. Serious matters of humanity also resonate in “Every Night When the Sun Goes In,” a meditation on parental loss of a child that complements Morten Lauridsen’s “Prayer,” which sets to music Dana Gioia’s elegy for his son, lost at only four months old.
Ben Parry’s “Flame” culminates the program, mirroring imagery from “This Little Light of Mine.” “Flame” assembles the concert’s full forces for the first time, magnifying the program’s theatricality and chief themes. The piece’s score bears an epigraph from Siddhartha Gautama, Buddha: “Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.” Although “Flame” does not quote these words, the central notion inspired Garth Bardsley’s text. Parry’s music begins with elemental simplicity before building to a splendid, scintillating climax. For Swanson, “The hope is that we can provide the audience with a kind of overwhelming feeling of ‘Wow! I’ve never been to something like this before.’ Or ‘I didn’t know choirs could sound like that.’”
“Chasing the Dawn” concludes with Luther Vandross’ “Brand New Day” from The Wiz, inviting audience members to join the choruses in song. Swanson described the intent behind the selection, “We want everybody to sing — and not just the people on stage — to celebrate all the singing that happens in Cincinnati, one of America’s great singing cities … and celebrate the act of singing itself. That’s one thing that the May Festival is all about.”
Along with the program’s apparent thematic and visual focus on light, music throughout the concert brings together other senses: “Brand New Day” inspires movement, and Jānis Peters’ text for Pēteris Vasks’s Māte saule compares a sunrise to a fermenting bread loaf — evoking light through taste and warmth.
Along many lines, the program encourages audiences to imagine surprising and fresh connections through its various people and communities, and within its sounds, words, images and symbols.
—Jacques Dupuis