May Festival Chorus: The Experience Behind the Stage

by David Lyman

Karolyn Johnsen will sing in her 50th May Festival this year.

It’s remarkable. Inspiring, really. The moment she starts reflecting on some of her more memorable performances, you understand precisely what has kept her coming back year after year. She speaks of the “emotionally overwhelming” experience of singing the Verdi Requiem. Or how “exhilarating” it is to sing Carmina Burana.

Then she stops herself. Is she being too effusive? After a long silence, she adds that “it seems to have gone by in a blur.”

Life-changing? For some, certainly. But as you speak with one May Festival Chorus member after another, there is a common theme that is revealed; for nearly every member, joining Cincinnati’s oldest chorus was a turning point, a defining moment in the singer’s musical life.

Every Chorus member is eager to share stories about the Chorus experience. There’s the hard work, of course. The three-hour rehearsals. And the demanding schedule during the May Festival itself.

But quickly, conversations turn to unforgettable musical memories and the extraordinary camaraderie that happens when you make music with friends.

“I still remember the first time singing with the Chorus at Music Hall,” says Lawrence E. Coleman Sr. “I walked off that stage and thought to myself ‘I have found heaven.’ I’ve been there ever since.”

Steve Dauterman recalls feeling more than a little daunted when he walked into his first Chorus rehearsal, 40 years ago.

“I was one of the youngest people in the room,” says Dauterman. “Now, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been around longer than almost anyone. I don’t know when that happened.”

Looking back, he chronicles various events in his life by how they related to various Chorus performances.

“I remember singing with the Chorus at Carnegie Hall in 2014,” he says. “I got up the next morning at 5 a.m., was at LaGuardia by 6:30 and flew to Chicago. My daughter was a senior in Musical Theatre at Northwestern. One weekend, two cities, two peak life moments. I wouldn’t change a thing.”

He’s on a roll now, ruminating on a string of particularly notable performances: singing Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem just weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, performing Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah at a Chorus America conference, and singing Mahler’s mammoth Symphony No. 8 with conductor Robert Shaw and a chorus of more than 600.

“I swear, the Mahler shook the rafters,” he says. “There have been so many great experiences.”

In the course of his 40 years, Dauterman has seen the Chorus become more select and more demanding. And, in his opinion, much, much better.

“I love the fact that we’re always welcoming new and younger members,” he says. “Natural turnover like this is how the Chorus stays vibrant and fresh. It’s such a diverse group of people.”

Take Sara Hook, for instance. She is just 28 and about to perform in her very first May Festival. By day, she’s a nurse anesthetist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She’s been singing most of her life. But during grad school, she’d had to give it up.

“There just wasn’t time,” she says.

But once she got settled into her new job, that longing to sing with other people became more compelling. She knew the Chorus, but had never auditioned. Now it was time. She spent most of last summer working with her old voice teacher to get ready for her August audition.

“I prepared two pieces,” she says. “One was in Latin, the other in German. It was difficult, but it was time to get back to singing. I missed it too much. And my fiancée was on board with it.”

Her wedding, incidentally, is scheduled for 2023. In May.

“The date was already set,” she says sheepishly. “But I gave Bob Porco a year’s notice. And I’ll only have to miss one week of performances.”

Clearly, singing with the May Festival Chorus is about more than standing on the risers and singing the right notes at the right time. It’s about exploring the music, immersing yourself in it. It’s about going on musical journeys surrounded by friends, whether music is familiar—the Mozart Requiem, for instance—or something completely new and complex, like John Adams’ El Niño, which the Chorus adds to its repertoire this year.

Few new members’ stories are more compelling than that of Fansheng Kong. He’s a biomedical researcher at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. His route to the Chorus has been a lengthy and convoluted one.

“I went to the audition and I failed,” says Kong. That was three years ago.

Now, for most of us, that one disappointment would be quite enough. But Kong is tenacious in a way that few of us can match. He came to the United States from his native China at the age of 34 to study for a PhD. That was in 1990. He’d been part of choirs back in China. So when he came to Cincinnati and heard about a Chinese choir in Mason—the Sound of Joy Choir—he decided to join.

Emboldened by the experience, he auditioned for the May Festival Chorus a second time. And, once again, he “failed.” That’s his word, incidentally, not ours. Undaunted, he signed up for another audition late last summer.

“I know I was denied two times,” says Kong. “But the one good thing about the Covid shutdown is that it gave me a lot of time to practice. When I auditioned this time, I went just to enjoy myself.”

Several days later, he received a letter welcoming him to the Chorus.

The memory of his first Chorus performance is still vivid in his memory. It was December’s Holiday Pops concert.

“You stand on the riser with the audience and orchestra in front of you. It was wonderful and amazing. And then we sang ‘Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah.’ You feel that everything has finally paid off.”