Robert Porco
Director of Choruses
Robert Porco has been recognized as one of the leading choral musicians in the United States and for more than 36 years has been an active preparer and conductor of choral and orchestral works, including most of the major choral repertoire, as well as of opera. His conducting career has spanned geographic venues across western Europe and the United States, including performances in the Edinburgh Festival; Taipei, Taiwan; Lucerne, Switzerland; and Reykjavik, Iceland; and in the May Festival, Tanglewood Music Festival, Berkshire Music Festival, Blossom Festival and Grant Park Festival.
Mr. Porco has been a regular guest conductor in the May Festival since 1991, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra since 1996 and the Cleveland Orchestra since 2000. His 2011-12 conducting schedule includes leading the Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Orchestra Chorus in Severance Hall performances of Verdi’s Requiem.
In 1989, Mr. Porco became Director of Choruses of the May Festival, and in 2010 he led the May Festival Chorus in the highly regarded debut of Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking, a piece commissioned by the Chorus in honor of Mr. Porco’s 20th season as director. Other notable events during Mr. Porco’s tenure are three highly acclaimed appearances by the Chorus in Carnegie Hall: a 1991 performance of Mendelssohn’s Elijah with Jesus Lopez-Cobos and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra; a 1995 performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 with Robert Shaw, the Cleveland Orchestra, the May Festival Chorus and other choruses; and an October 2001 performance of Britten’s War Requiem with James Conlon and the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. In addition, the May Festival Chorus’s 2008 performance of the Pulitzer Prize-winning On the Transmigration of Souls, under the baton of the composer John Adams, led Mr. Adams to write, “The pure American quality of their enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level, and for once the piece did not seem as compromised and uneven as I had previously thought.”
In 1998, Mr. Porco became Director of Choruses for the Cleveland Orchestra, preparing the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus for appearances in Severance Hall and the Blossom Festival and with the Orchestra in the Edinburgh Festival in 1999, in Carnegie Hall in 2002, and at the Lucerne Festival and London Proms in 2005.
Mr. Porco has gained national recognition for his preparation of choruses for such prominent conductors as John Adams, Pierre Boulez, James Conlon, Andrew Davis, Christoph von Dohnányi, Paavo Jarvi, Erich Kunzel, Raymond Leppard, James Levine, Jahja Ling, Jesus Lopez-Cobos, Zubin Mehta, John Nelson, Andre Previn, Kurt Sanderling, Leonard Slatkin, Robert Shaw, Franz Welser-Möst, John Williams and David Zinman.
In 2009, Mr. Porco resumed doctoral teaching in the Choral Department of the Indiana University School of Music, where he taught and served as chairman from 1979 to 1998. A highlight of Mr. Porco’s previous tenure at IU included leading a wholly student choral and orchestral ensemble of 250 in a highly acclaimed performance of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass as part of the Tanglewood Music Festival’s celebration of the composer’s 70th birthday.
As teacher and mentor, Mr. Porco has guided and influenced the development of hundreds of musicians, most of whom are now active as professional conductors, singers or teachers in schools of music, performance ensembles or solo careers. Mr. Porco remains a sought-after guest instructor and coach for conservatory students; young, professional conductors; and singers. His guest teaching venues have included Harvard University, the University of Miami Frost School of Music and Westminster Choir College (Princeton, NJ).
From 1988 to 1998, Mr. Porco was Artistic Director and Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphonic Choir.
