MAY FESTIVAL COVER STORY
FINALLY, A MAY FESTIVAL IN FULL BLOOM by Hannah Edgar
It’s all too easy to brand 2020 and 2021 as the “Should Years.” In 2020, the May Festival should have featured John Adams’ epic opera-oratorio El Niño, with the composer himself on the podium. It also should have unveiled a new choral-orchestral co-commission by composer Jessie Montgomery—with a libretto by her mother, the writer and stage artist Robbie McCauley, who passed away last summer. Nor was it possible to revive those works in 2021, when low vaccination and steady positivity rates made it too risky to convene the full chorus with orchestra. Instead of preparing for its 150th anniversary in 2023, the May Festival faced arguably the greatest threat to its existence since its founding. But Robert Porco would like to offer a reframe. Director of Choruses of the May Festival since 1989, he says he’s never seen as many singers clamber to join the May Festival Chorus as he has this season, welcoming 30 new members out of its 120 volunteer singers. And he’s proud of what the May Festival was able to achieve in 2021, even as musicians contorted themselves under unfamiliar strictures: Choristers sang masked and in reduced numbers
in front of a widely spaced orchestra and Principal Conductor Juanjo Mena, whose gestures were livestreamed onto a monitor for singers to follow. So far this season, the choir has continued rehearsing and performing with mitigation protocols. “I’m on the side of caution, and we’ve done very well. No one got sick, and artistically it worked; singing masked doesn’t affect the sound nearly as much as people think,” Porco says, calling between rehearsal days from a hotel room in Cincinnati. Though unable to reunite with his beloved choir for much of the pandemic, Porco remained connected to the May Festival Chorus in other ways: He started Bob’s Kitchen (mayfestival.com/ bobs-kitchen), a series of beloved Porco family recipes he shared online with the May Festival community, and he called each Chorus member three times during the pandemic. During those phone conversations, Porco talked to many choristers at length about their own extra-musical passions, sometimes for the first time. “In a chorus like this, there’s always somebody who’s an expert in something. I happen to specialize in music, but we might have someone
Principal Conductor Juanjo Mena led the treble voices of the May Festival Chorus and the CSO during May Festival 2021. Credit: Mark Lyons
6 | MAY FESTIVAL 2022
