ROBERT PORCO, Director of Choruses
Matthew Swanson, Associate Director of Choruses
Heather MacPhail, Accompanist
Sergey Tkachenko, Conducting Fellow
Sarah Farwell, Chorus Manager
Kathleen Moran, Chorus Librarian
The May Festival Chorus has earned national and international acclaim for its musicality and command of repertoire. Consisting of more than 130 avocational singers who collectively devote more than 45,000 hours in rehearsals and performances annually, the Chorus is the core artistic element of the Cincinnati May Festival and the official chorus of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO) and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. The premier choral ensemble in Cincinnati, the May Festival Chorus has garnered national and international attention through numerous PBS broadcasts and award-winning recordings, many in collaboration with the CSO and Pops. In 2016, the Chorus released, to critical acclaim, a live Bridge Records recording of Robert Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses with James Conlon conducting the May Festival Chorus and the CSO at Carnegie Hall, and, in 2017, the Chorus re-released its popular a cappella holiday recording Christmas with the May Festival Chorus on the Fanfare Cincinnati label. The Chorus is also featured on several Pops recordings, which have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.