The 2024 May Festival, with the May Festival Chorus, May Festival Youth Chorus and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, celebrates music that carries us through histories—of labor, of the land, of people and place. The Festival begins at the beginning—with a celebration of life and light in the magnificent Haydn’s The Creation. The second concert follows with Anthems—looking at and questioning our assumptions about honor, bravery, power and peace—featuring David Lang’s poignant national anthems, my raucous and raging Pretty, Vaughan Williams’ plea for peace Dona Nobis Pacem, and my new choral work, All that breathes—a plea for breath and life—written especially for the May Festival. The third concert, Voices of the Earth presents the surround-sound Natural History—a collaboration between composer Michael Gordon and the Steiger Butte Drum and Singers of the Klamath Tribe—to celebrate the natural wonder of the Crater Lake region. This concert also features the intrepid Bang on a Can All-Stars in my work Anthracite Fields—delving deep into labor history and the anthracite coal community in northeastern Pennsylvania. We close with Her Story—my high voltage oratorio, Her Story, on women and equality. This work includes the spectacular chamber choir Lorelei, with staging by Anne Kauffman and set design by Jeff Sugg. Closing the evening we have Fauré’s Requiem—a work full of human feeling and a strange sense of rest.

—Julia Wolfe