May Festival News

May Festival Final Concert
Hundreds of Performers will be on Music Hall Stage
for 2009 Season Finale

CINCINNATI, OHIO — The number 500 evokes a sense of the awesome, the grand, and the expansive, as in the Fortune 500 companies and the Indianapolis 500. The Saturday, May 30th final performance of the 2009 May Festival season could well be entitled “The May Festival 500.” James Conlon, the festival’s Music Director, is amassing over 500 artists to perform Gustav Mahler’s gargantuan work for chorus and symphony, the Symphony No.8 in E‐flat Major, Symphony of a Thousand, on the stage of Music Hall in Cincinnati at 8 pm. The performers are comprised by the renowned May Festival Chorus, the Cincinnati Children’s Choir, the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, eight acclaimed soloists, and an expanded Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra.

For many, hearing a live performance Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand is a once‐in‐a‐lifetime experience. Monumental in scale and unparalleled in scope, the Symphony No. 8 premiered in Vienna in 1910, marking the crowning achievement of Mahler’s career and astonishing the concertgoing public. It has been performed on the Cincinnati May Festival stage no less than seven times in the Festival’s 136 year history. Saturday’s concert provides yet another rare opportunity to experience Mahler’s masterpiece, which has been described by Herbert von Karajan as “...music coming from another world, it is coming from eternity.” The Symphony No.8 contains intertwining sacred and secular texts with a herculean vocal and instrumental score. Although Mahler’s religious beliefs were not formally defined, his profound spirituality— a hybrid of God and Goethe, eternal life versus eternal love, and his belief in the Sacred Feminine (for Mahler, his wife, Alma Maria)— is poignantly revealed in the Symphony.

With the combined voices of two cities (Cincinnati and Cleveland), an expanded orchestra and eight soloists, the performance of the Symphony of a Thousand marks the grand finale to the celebratory 2009 season which has observed Conlon’s 30th year with the Festival. Seldom has a concert of such magnitude been presented in Music Hall. May Festival is the oldest continuous choral festival in the Western Hemisphere. Established in 1873, May Festival is directly responsible for the development of Cincinnati’s modern musical life.

Duke Energy Foundation is the 2009 Season Sponsor of the May Festival. Macy’s Foundation is underwriting the May 30 Mahler concert. Support also comes from the Fine Arts Fund, The Carol Ann and Ralph V. Haile, Jr. Foundation, Ohio Arts Council, and City of Cincinnati.

Tickets are still available by calling 513.381.3300 or click the link below.

Media Contact: Guy LaJeunesse, Manager of Marketing and Communications 513.744.3250 or glajeunesse@mayfestival.com.