Last season, the Cincinnati Boychoir and the May Festival announced an historic alliance — here’s how it came to be, and how it’s going.

by Hannah Edgar

Jason Alexander Holmes had a difficult conversation ahead of him. 

At the end of 2023, Holmes learned he’d won a job as the Associate Director of Choruses and Youth Chorus Director of the May Festival. That was great news for his career — but bad news for the Cincinnati Boychoir, which was only just getting back on its feet after the pandemic and which he’d led as Artistic Director since 2019. 

Jason Alexander Holmes (Credit: Lyons Photography)

So, when he met with Boychoir board chairs Katy Sheehan and Emily Reinhold at a Cincinnati café to break the news, he floated an idea he’d already spitballed with May Festival Director of Choruses Matthew Swanson and then-May Festival Executive Director Steven Sunderman. What if the Cincinnati Boychoir came into the fold of the May Festival?

It went over better than he’d imagined. After recovering from the initial shock of Holmes’ announcement, Sheehan herself could see the benefits of such a union “right away.”

Boychoir board members Katy Sheehan and Bryan Hafertepe

“It almost immediately segued from, ‘How are we going to find a new Boychoir director?’ to ‘How can we make a partnership with each other?’” Sheehan recalled. 

On its own, the Boychoir was, in Sheehan’s words, “small but mighty.” Before the alliance, the organization had two full-time staff, one part-timer and two hourly employees. All were working overtime to try to rebuild the chorus to its pre-pandemic enrollment. (The Boychoir’s goal is to field 60 singers in time for its 60th anniversary this year.)

In that climate, the prospect of sharing administrative and operational costs with the May Festival was a welcome relief. 

“That administrative support was a huge part of what was needed,” Holmes says.

May Festival Youth Chorus, Cincinnati Boychoir and Cincinnati Youth Choir performing Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand for the May Festival’s 150th anniversary season in 2023. (Credit: Mark Lyons)

The alliance was just as beneficial for the May Festival. Festival board chair Michael Curran noted that the organization almost always had to pull singers from outside its ranks if repertoire called for a boy chorus or soloist. With the Boychoir under its umbrella, the May Festival was, for example, able to call on the Boychoir for its November Chichester Psalms performance, resulting in Cincinnati Boychoir soprano Elessar DeHoff, clad in the organization’s signature yellow-and-black bowtie, taking center stage as boy soloist. 

“We have the MiNis [pre-K education program], we have the teenagers and we have the adults. But we were missing that late-grade-school-to-early-teenager part,” Curran says.

Both organizations also noted the tough recruitment prospects of male choral singers generally. Men are underrepresented even in the May Festival Chorus. According to Holmes, that gap is trending bigger, not smaller.

“If you look at the May Festival Chorus, the adult chorus, it’s not 50/50 soprano-alto and tenor-bass. It’s, like, two-thirds soprano-alto and then a third tenor-bass,” Holmes says. “Looking at that, you think, ‘Okay, we’ve got to have something in the pipeline to fix this.’”

Curran and Bryan Hafertepe, the Boychoir’s board secretary, both echo Holmes’ concern.

“The May Festival historically struggles to get young boys and men to audition. The Boychoir was always a bit of a feeder for the changed voices in that organization,” Holmes says.

May Festival Youth Chorus and Cincinnati Boychoir singing in the world premiere performance of James Lee III’s Breaths of Universal Longings at the 2023 May Festival. (Credit: Mark Lyons)

In the ensuing months, the leaders of both organizations — Swanson and Sunderman from the May Festival and Sheehan and Reinhold from the Boychoir — met to talk more seriously about what such a partnership might look like. Holmes, as the common denominator between the two, came to the table with both organizations’ interests in mind.

“It was never contentious, which you always worry about,” Sheehan says. “We really wanted to make sure we presented a united front.”

Throughout, the executive committee and board of the Boychoir also met separately to discuss their own non-negotiables. The Boychoir endeavored to keep things as consistent as possible for its young singers amid all the changes. For example, it still rehearses at its usual home, the Aronoff Center for the Arts. And the Boychoir is now led by a veteran of the organization, Lisa Peters, its assistant conductor for nearly a decade.

“When the singers [learned] that Jason was stepping over to the May Festival, that was a relief to them, too. It’s a familiar face,” Peters says.

So far, it’s going well for both the Boychoir and May Festival Youth Chorus. Rather than competing for the same demographic, enrollment has increased for both ensembles — “pretty unheard of” in the context of such a major transition, Holmes notes.

The Cincinnati Boychoir warms up with the May Festival Youth Chorus and Cincinnati Youth Choir in advance of their performance of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand. (Credit: JP Leong)

Above all, both organizations agreed, from the beginning, that it was imperative for the Boychoir to retain its own identity. This season, the choir has continued to run its own programming independent of the May Festival. 

“The true north in all the conversations was remaining a boy-centric organization,” says Hafertepe. “There are plenty of athletic places for boys to just be boys, but there aren’t a lot of artistic places in society for boys to just be boys.”

For Hafertepe, it’s personal: he was a Boychoir member from 2000 to 2003. He still fondly remembers understudying for a boy soprano role in Music Hall. Hafertepe has since come out as gay, but at the time the secret weighed on his social life.

“When I was playing soccer, I hid parts of myself. Boychoir gave me more space to be me,” he says. “I don’t think I’m friends with anybody I played soccer with. But I still have probably a half-dozen people I sang with in Boychoir who are still good friends of mine, all over the country.”

Members of the bass section of the May Festival Chorus (Credit: JP Leong)