Music at St. Mary's Concert Series presents Cincinnati Boychoir April 12

Courtesy of John Glaze

The Music at St. Mary's Concert Series presents the Cincinnati Boychoir in Concert on Sunday, April 12 at 3 p.m.

The Cincinnati Boychoir is one of the premiere professional boychoirs in the United States. Located in the urban arts core of Cincinnati at the Aronoff Center for the Arts, the Boychoir reaches approximately 200 young men each year from more than 90 schools in Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana.

Since 1965, the Cincinnati Boychoir has been dedicated to the musical, intellectual, and emotional development of these young men and has served as one of the foremost music education and performance organizations in the region; boys attend weekly rehearsals, retreats, music theory classes, and the annual SongFest Summer Music Camp for Boys at Xavier University.

Each year, the Cincinnati Boychoir presents approximately thirty annual performances in the Greater Cincinnati region, and has performed concerts and completed residencies both at home and abroad; most recently, the Boychoir undertook three three-day residencies with boychoirs in England (June 2013), and a week-long residency at the Hotchkiss School in northwest Connecticut (June 2014).

As an organization that values collaboration, the Boychoir has built artistic partnerships with Cincinnati’s Vocal Arts Ensemble, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, the musicians of Christ Church Cathedral, Collegium Cincinnati, and Elementz, as well as the many choirs that together make Cincinnati ‘The City That Sings.’ In 2013, the Cincinnati Boychoir was the subject of a thirty-minute special on WCET, Cincinnati’s public television station, entitled “A Treasure of Youth and Song.”

The Boychoir performs regularly with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and May Festival Chorus, most recently under the direction of James Conlon in 2012 (Orff: Carmina Burana), 2011 (Mendelssohn: Elijah), and 2010 (Bach: St. Matthew Passion), and under the direction of Rafael Frübeck de Burgos in October, 2012 (Mahler: Symphony No. 3).

Soloists from the Boychoir have performed with the Cincinnati Opera, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Pops, the Dayton Philharmonic, the Dayton Opera, the Blue Ash-Montgomery Symphony Orchestra, the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and with many other national and regional orchestras. Six members of the Boychoir have gone on to join the world-famous Vienna Boys’ Choir. Participation in the Champion’s Competition of the World Choir Games in July 2012 resulted in two silver medals for the boys in the mixed choir and the youth choir divisions.

Recent projects include Britten’s Saint Nicolas with Collegium Cincinnati (March 2013), Duruflé’s Messe cum jubilo (March 2014), a boys-and-men-only performance of Handel’s Messiah with Collegium Cincinnati (December 2014), and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, paired with the world premiere of Dominick DiOrio’s A Horizon Symphony, composed for the Boychoir (March 2015).

Originally founded on March 6, 1965 as the Cincinnati All-City Boys Choir, the choir made its debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and May Festival Chorus for a presentation of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. At that time the Instructional Consultant of Music for the Cincinnati Public Schools, Robert McSpadden conducted the choir’s weekly rehearsals and organized its program and concerts with no budgetary support from the Cincinnati Public Schools other than the provision of rehearsal space and the use of copiers for duplication of music; the director and his assistant wrote all of the early arrangements for the boys to sing, pieces which remain in the Boychoir’s repertoire to this day. The choir program came to its demise at the end of the 1976-1977 season when the tax levy for the Cincinnati Public Schools failed and the choir lost both its rehearsal space and the use of the copiers.

Founded anew in 1978, the new Cincinnati “Boyschoir” (later “BoyChoir,” and finally “Boychoir” to be consistent with the formal term later adopted by the American Choral Directors Association) permitted singers from the newly developing surrounding school districts to participate. The choir rehearsed in churches, with the exception of the 1985-1986 school year when practices were held at the School for Creative and Performing Arts. The choir began its presentation of an annual tour outside the greater Cincinnati area in 1981.

Randall Wolfe, the choir’s assistant director and accompanist beginning in 1981, became director in 1986. In 1988 the choir saw its first development into a two-tiered structure which included a Preparatory Choir for first-year singers and a Concert Choir for the more skilled veteran boys. In 1993 the system became three-tiered, including the Training Choir and the Resident Choir. In 2011, the Boychoir restructured to place a high value on the older boys teaching the younger ones; while the Training Choir remains the initial experience for novice boys, the Concert Choir handles the bulk of in-town performances, and the Tour Choir boys (all of whom sing in the Concert Choir) perform nationally and internationally in special appearances. Christopher Eanes is director of the Cincinnati Boychoir.

Music At St. Mary’s is pleased to be able to be a small part of the 50th anniversary of the Cincinnati Boychoir. The Concert Series operates and provides events with no admission being charged. Donations are accepted following each concert.