Recognized as one of the leading choral musicians in the United States, Robert Porco has been an active preparer and conductor of choral and orchestral works and a highly regarded educator in the practice and art of conducting and choral leadership for more than 40 years. 

The 2023–24 season is Porco’s 35th as Director of Choruses of Cincinnati’s May Festival, starting in the position in 1989. In 2011, Porco received Chorus America’s Michael Korn Founders Award for Development of the Professional Choral Art. In 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024, the May Festival, with the May Festival Chorus (MFC) at its core, was named “One of the Best Classical Music Festivals in the U.S. and Canada” by BBC Magazine.

Notable performances during Porco’s tenure with the May Festival have included the 2010 premiere he led of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, a piece commissioned by the MFC in honor of Porco’s 20th season as director. Acclaimed Carnegie Hall performances he prepared include Mendelssohn’s Elijah in 1991 with Jesús López Cobos, the MFC and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra (CSO); Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in 1995 with Robert Shaw, the MFC, The Cleveland Orchestra, and other choruses; and Britten’s War Requiem in 2001 with James Conlon, the MFC and the CSO. The 2014 performance of R. Nathaniel Dett’s The Ordering of Moses and John Adams’ Harmonium, with the MFC, Conlon and the CSO, “shook the rafters…. Carnegie has seldom felt so alive,” according to The New Yorker.

The MFC’s 2008 performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls, under the baton of composer John Adams, led Adams to write, “The pure American quality of their enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level, and for once the piece did not seem as compromised and uneven as I had previously thought.”

Porco’s conducting career has spanned geographic venues across western Europe and the U.S., including performances in the Edinburgh Festival; Taipei, Taiwan; Lucerne, Switzerland; Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, Israel; Reykjavík, Iceland; and in the May Festival, Tanglewood Music Festival, Berkshire Music Festival, Blossom Festival and Grant Park Festival. He has guest conducted at the May Festival since 1991, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra since 1996, and with The Cleveland Orchestra since 2000.

From 1998 to 2017, Porco was Director of Choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra, preparing the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus (COC) for appearances in Severance Hall and the Blossom Festival and with the Orchestra at the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, at Carnegie Hall in 2002 and at the Lucerne Festival and London Proms in 2005. Porco’s work during the 2013–14 season included preparing the COC for its debut with the Orchestra in Frankfurt, Paris and Luxembourg. From 1988 to 1998, Porco was Artistic Director and Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir.

Porco has gained national recognition for his preparation of choruses for prominent conductors such as John Adams, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Andrew Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Paavo Järvi, Erich Kunzel, Louis Langrée, Raymond Leppard, James Levine, Jahja Ling, Jesús López Cobos, Zubin Mehta, Juanjo Mena, John Nelson, André Previn, Kurt Sanderling, Robert Shaw, Leonard Slatkin, Franz Welser-Möst, John Williams and David Zinman.

Porco taught doctoral-level choral conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music from 1979 to 1998, in addition to serving as Department Chair, and returned as a guest instructor in 2011 and 2012. A highlight of his tenure at IU included leading a wholly student choral and orchestral ensemble of 250 in a highly acclaimed performance of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS as part of the Tanglewood Music Festival’s celebration of the composer’s 70th birthday. As teacher and mentor, Porco has guided and influenced the development of hundreds of musicians, most of whom are now active as professional conductors and singers, and as teachers in public and private schools and in schools of music. Porco remains a sought-after guest instructor and coach for conservatory students, young professional conductors, and singers. His guest teaching venues have included Harvard University, the University of Miami Frost School of Music, the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and Westminster Choir College (Princeton, NJ).