Robert Porco: Reflecting on 35 Years as Director of Choruses

by David Lyman

This is it.

After 35 years, Robert Porco is stepping down as director of the May Festival Chorus. His tenure has been a remarkable one, even more so when you consider that during 19 years of that time he was also the director of choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra.

We could list all the music he and his singers have explored together. But we’d need another 20,000 words for that. Besides, it’s likely that you remember some already. There were several performances of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand, too. There was the memorable presentation of Britten’s War Requiem at Carnegie Hall just a month after the 9/11 attacks and the many world and Cincinnati premieres. Oh, and we can’t forget the umpteen performances of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.”

But it’s not just the volume and the breadth of work that Porco led that we will remember. Rather, it’s the understanding and stylistic precision that he brought to every piece of that sprawling choral repertoire.

With each new piece of music, Porco’s choruses sounded like they’d been performing them for years. It didn’t make any difference if the music was familiar or if it was something completely new, if it was melodic or musically jarring, if it was in English or any of the many other languages the Chorus members were called on to master.

So after that astonishing musical output, what has he chosen for his grand finale?

“Grand finale?” replies Bob, as he is known to everyone who meets him. “I’m not thinking of it that way. It may be true, but I don’t want to think of it that way, so I’m not.”

He doesn’t want to indulge in sentimentality, or reflect too intensely about the singers who have devoted hundreds, even thousands, of hours to working with him.

So the conversation quickly turns in a different, lighter direction. It’s his personal journey. Not a metaphorical journey, mind you. He’s suddenly talking about the journey he makes every week to attend May Festival Chorus rehearsals.

For those who aren’t aware, Bob Porco does not live in Cincinnati. He lives 255 miles northeast of here, in Chagrin Falls, Ohio—in the far reaches of suburban Cleveland.

“By my wife’s estimate, I’ve driven more than 600,000 miles back and forth to Cincinnati,” he says. It sounds mind-numbing. But Porco insists that’s not the case. “For some reason, I don’t find it tedious at all. It’s private time.”

It’s also time for Sirius XM streaming.

“There is a Sinatra station I listen to. And a wonderful jazz station. There’s the Broadway channel, too. And a symphony channel. I joke to the Chorus that if I listen to a very slow movement, I’ll find myself going 40 mph on the interstate.”

As soon as the Chorus’ Tuesday night rehearsals finish, he hops back into his “beautiful blue” Audi A4 and heads home.

“After rehearsal, I’m too keyed up to sleep. So I go home. I’m usually there by 2:30 a.m.”

It sounds like a completely crazy schedule. But for Bob Porco, it has become “a routine.” And just as quickly as he started talking about his commute, he has grown serious again, perhaps even a bit melancholy.

“I think I will miss it.”

It’s hard to know if he’s talking about driving or the rehearsals or the May Festival itself. After a short silence, he begins again.

“I can’t say enough about this Chorus,” he says quietly. “It’s an inspiration to me to think how much time and effort these people spend just for the love of music. Sometimes I drive them pretty hard.”

And he does have a reputation for occasionally being tough on them, abrupt, brusque. Worst of all, he sometimes shows that he is disappointed in them. But none of it lasts long. Besides, he is as demanding of himself as he is of his singers. To Bob Porco, it’s the music that is paramount.

He rattles off the rehearsal schedule the Chorus will soon be facing. It’s not just the weekly rehearsals. They all put in enormous amounts of preparation time, as well. And then there is production week—the week before the Festival begins.

“The Saturday before, they’ll be there six hours. And six hours on Sunday. And then every day for five nights, two weekends of concerts—it’s like a boot camp, really.”

Porco may not want to think of The Creation as a farewell. But musically speaking, it seems a perfect piece of music to close out such a distinguished career.

As you can imagine, winnowing down the list of musical possibilities to a final May Festival program can be frustrating. There is an abundance of fine music to share with audiences. But with the May Festival lasting just two weekends, there is only so much music that can be played each year.

The Creation, it seems, had been under consideration for a few years. But for one reason or another, it hadn’t made it onto the final programming lists. For one thing, it was performed as part of the 2015 May Festival. In fact, it has been performed eight times since its May Festival premiere in 1886.

But with the world around us consumed in turbulence and uncertainty, the optimism in Haydn’s masterwork made it an ideal selection.

“I think it’s one of those nearly perfect pieces of music in terms of its structure,” says Porco. “And although I’ve done it a number of times, it still seems fresh and witty to me. It’s one of those rare, completely positive pieces of music.”

There is a certain wonderment as Haydn and librettist Gottfried van Swieten lead us through the seven days of Creation, starting with heavenly chaos and proceeding through the formation of the sun and moon, the seas and mountains and the flora and fauna that make up the majesty of the earth.

“It’s the most enlightening and inspirational piece,” says Porco. “It’s the work of a man at the height of his powers. It begins with this uneasiness. He has all the strings muted until we get to the second movement. And the moment we have light in the world, the mutes come off and there is this musical blaze of glory. History books describe how, at one of the first performances, the audience erupted in cheers. I wish we still did that.”

Once again, he is quiet.

“You know, when I was at Indiana University, there was a professor there—a distinguished violinist named Josef Gingold. He used to tell us that music is not a career, it is a life, like the blood coursing through your body.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I’m 83 now, but this is something I’ve been doing since I was six years old. It has been the main thing in my life. One of the first memories I have is when I was a child back in a poor area of Steubenville. We were living close to the mills and the railroad. Someone knocked on the door. He was selling guitar lessons and I started to cry. My mother wanted to know why. I told her that I didn’t want to play the guitar. I wanted to play the accordion.”

And so he did. Perhaps it was the comparative lushness of the accordion’s sound. Or that he had seen others in his largely Italian community playing it. Whatever the case, the accordion would come to serve him well. After completing a degree in music education at The Ohio State University, that accordion would become a calling card among the elementary school children he taught for several years.

“Those were good times,” he adds. “The kids enjoyed that music so much. So did I. I still do.”

Bob assures us he is not done with music.

“I am not a gardener,” he says adamantly. “I have no idea exactly what I’m going to do, to be honest. But like Josef Gingold said, you don’t really retire from music. It’s my life. My love. What I can tell you, though, is that I will miss the people in the May Festival Chorus. Even today, 35 years after I started this, I am humbled by their singing. What a gift they have given me.”