Matthew Swanson is Associate Director of Choruses, Director of the Youth Chorus and Director of Special Projects for the Cincinnati May Festival. He annually prepares the May Festival Chorus and Youth Chorus for performances with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and for their featured appearances at the May Festival. Additionally, he develops and produces special projects for the May Festival in collaboration with local, regional and national organizations.
At the May Festival, he has instituted an annual Youth Chorus commissioning project, the presentation of community choral concerts during the May Festival, a program of free professional voice instruction for Chorus and Youth Chorus members, free in-school choral clinics for area middle and high schools, and the Youth Chorus Enrichment Program. In addition, he has expanded institutional support for the Youth Chorus, which is fully cost-free for members.
His portfolio of special projects at the May Festival has included staged productions of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS (2018) and Candide (2022) and the formation of the May Festival Community Chorus. In celebration of the May Festival’s 150th anniversary season in 2023, he led 25 for 25: A New Time for Choral Music, the May Festival’s wide-ranging community commissioning project.
Elsewhere, his affiliations have included the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center (New York), where he has been assistant conductor, production consultant and programmer. He has previously worked on the music faculties of Berkshire Choral International and the National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. He is frequently engaged as a host and presenter of lectures and concerts in Cincinnati, New York and elsewhere.
In the 2023–24 academic year, he concluded a four-year tenure as conductor of the Xavier Choir at Xavier University and taught conducting and choral literature in the graduate conducting program at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (CCM). He also led Vox Antiqua, an ensemble of the CCM Early Music Lab.
Swanson is a native of southeast Iowa and was educated at the University of Notre Dame (BA), CCM (MM, DMA), and King’s College, Cambridge (MMus). He held the May Festival Conducting Fellowship in 2015. In December of 2023, the May Festival announced that Matthew Swanson will become the 16th Director of Choruses for the Cincinnati May Festival, effective June 1, 2024. He succeeds Robert Porco, who has led the Chorus for more Festivals than any other choral director in the organization’s 151-year history, and to whom he is greatly indebted.