Since 2005, Richard Coffey has been the Music Director of Hartford Chorale, the region’s principal symphonic chorus. In this role, he has conducted the Chorale and the Hartford Symphony in concerts of major works in Hartford’s Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts. In 2008 Mr. Coffey and the Hartford Chorale, with the New York Choral Society, engaged in a singing tour of China at the special invitation of the Ministry of Culture of the Peoples’ Republic of China. In 2014 he conducted the Hartford Chorale in a singing tour of France, with performances in The American Church in Paris, Eglise St. Etienne-du-Mont, and Chartres Cathedral. In the summer of 2017, Hartford Chorale toured Prague, Vienna and Budapest, where Mr. Coffey conducted the group in concerts at the Church of the Holy Saviour, Stephansdom and Matthias Church, respectively.
Mr. Coffey was previously the Minister of Music for South Church in New Britain, Connecticut, where he directed a choir of professional and avocational singers in liturgy and in concert, a position he held for 45 years. Mr. Coffey has served on the faculties of the Hartt School and of the University of Connecticut. From 1988 until 1993, he was Chorus Master for the Connecticut Opera Association. In 2014, Mr. Coffey stepped down as Artistic Director of CONCORA, which he founded in 1974 as the region’s first all-professional concert choir.
In 1992, Mr. Coffey was named Choral Director of the Year by the Connecticut Chapter of the American Choral Directors Association, and in 2007, he received a Major Achievement Award from The Hartford Symphony Orchestra in recognition of his “outstanding and inspiring artistic leadership of the Symphony’s two major choral partners, CONCORA and the Hartford Chorale.” In 2008 the Greater New Britain Arts Alliance presented him its award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Mr. Coffey is the 2009 recipient of the Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to choral singing and its culture within New England.
In June, Mr. Coffey will conclude his seventeen-year tenure as Music Director of the Hartford Chorale.
