Cathedral Choral Society Directors Share Backgrounds, Plans
By • December 18, 2023 0 899
“Five or six days before Pearl Harbor,” recounted Christopher Eanes, executive director of the Cathedral Choral Society, Washington National Cathedral’s newly formed symphonic chorus held its “very first rehearsal” — of Giuseppe Verdi’s Messa di Requiem.
Eighty-two years and a couple weeks later, on Dec. 14, he and Steven Fox, CCS’s third music director, gave an upbeat joint presentation as part of The Georgetowner’s cultural breakfast series at the Four Seasons Hotel.
The oldest symphonic chorus in Washington, D.C. — which boasts three of the nation’s dozen such ensembles — CCS has some 150 singers on its roster, 125 or so actively singing. Founded by Paul Callaway, the chorus, an independent membership group since the mid-1980s, was led by J. Reilly Lewis until his death in 2016.
Eanes joined the organization in 2019, two years after Fox, relocating from Ohio, where he led the Cincinnati Boychoir. The duo’s charge, said Eanes, was to take “an incredible legacy,” rooted in the music of the Anglican church, and “make it really relevant to the 21st century.”
The pandemic shutdown of live performance provided the opportunity to ask, “When we come out of it, who do we want to be?” Forced to pivot to streaming, video and other online means of communication, “by the end, we actually got quite good at it,” said Eanes, who added: “We [now] reach people in all 50 states and more than 20 countries.”
As gratifying as getting “a lot of international feedback” has been hearing from people “who live 10 minutes away from the cathedral” that can’t (or couldn’t during the first years of Covid) leave their homes, Eanes said. The experience raised an important question: “How can we think globally about this hyperlocal thing?”
The chorus’s participatory nature has helped it defy the current pressures on classical music presenters, according to Eanes. “We’ve had more people audition for this chorus since the end of the pandemic than we’ve ever seen,” he reported, including many under the age of 35.
Midway, Eanes turned the lectern over to Fox, who explained that the chorus aims to balance works “that our audience knows well and loves to hear CCS perform” with “new works that remind us that classical music is not something of the past.”
Another of Fox’s priorities is “bringing music to the public that deserves to be heard.” Along those lines, he shared a remarkable part of his background: A music and Russian student at Dartmouth, Fox received a Reynolds Scholarship for Foreign Study and, while living in Saint Petersburg, founded the first period-instrument orchestra in Russia, reviving a lost repertoire from the court of Catherine the Great.
Also artistic director of New York’s Clarion Choir and Orchestra — which received Grammy nominations for recordings of the rediscovered Russian works — Fox got the call offering him CCS’s artistic directorship in a taxi en route to his wedding. His reaction on first visiting Washington National Cathedral, “that magnificent space,” was: “I really want to be here.”
As an example of his programming vision, Fox cited the March 2022 concert “I Have Something to Say,” marking the centenary of the Nineteenth Amendment. Postponed from 2020 due to the pandemic, the program combined music by Fanny Mendelssohn, Nadia Boulanger and suffragist Dame Ethel Smyth with three commissions from prominent women composers Augusta Read Thomas, Lisa Bielawa and Jessie Montgomery.
Though his creativity is appreciated by the board’s music committee, Fox joked that “my great ideas come after the print deadline.”
Both Fox and Eanes referred to the chorus’s ongoing partnership with the D.C.-based Heritage Signature Chorale, dedicated to performing African American choral music. On May 19, the two ensembles and Pershing’s Own U.S. Army Blues will present Duke Ellington’s “Sacred Concert” at the cathedral, with free admission. “I’ve learned so much from our partner, [HSC Artistic Director] Stanley Thurston,” remarked Fox.
Next season, CCS and HSC are planning to perform Margaret Bonds’s 1954 cantata “The Ballad of the Brown King,” dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr. with a libretto by Langston Hughes, in its entirety.
In response to a question about working with young people, Eanes said that CCS, which had been sending teaching artists into public schools, is now “starting from zero” to rethink its education program. On that topic, Fox will conduct this year’s High School Choir Festival, the 17th annual, on Jan. 31 at the cathedral.
