By Janelle Gelfand
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The Cincinnati May Festival's 2003 season will celebrate 125 years in Music Hall with great choral favorites and festival firsts.

May Festival music director James Conlon (Enquirer file photo) | ZOOM |

"There are other choral festivals," says music director James Conlon, who was in town to appear with the Linton Music Series on Sunday. "But I know of few events like this, where a festival this old has continued year after year. Both the (Cincinnati) Symphony and Music Hall owe their existence to a choral festival. That's absolutely unique."

The 130-year-old May Festival was founded in 1873, and moved into Music Hall in 1878.

To hail the combination of Music Hall and the May Festival, Mr. Conlon is revisiting some "really big" festival traditions for the 2003 season, May 16-24. He will conduct three Music Hall performances, as well as the special concert in Covington's Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption.

The festival opens May 16 with an all-Verdi program: the composer's massive Messa da Requiem, as well as his Stabat Mater and Te Deum, the last two pieces Verdi wrote. Opening-night soloists will include the renowned Metropolitan Opera basso James Morris, who last appeared with the festival in 1986, also in Verdi's Requiem.

Tenor Frank Lopardo, a regular at the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden, San Francisco and Chicago, will make his festival debut. Other opening-night newcomers are soprano Kallen Esperian (one of the "Three Sopranos" of PBS fame) and Luciana D'Intino, an Italian mezzo whom Mr. Conlon first heard on Riccardo Muti's recording of Don Carlo from La Scala.

The first weekend will continue on a "biblical, religious theme," Mr. Conlon says, with Mendelssohn's popular oratorio Elijah on May 17, to be conducted by Robert Porco, director of choruses. Returning singers Cynthia Haymon, Marietta Simpson and John Aler will join Mr. Morris as Elijah's soloists.

IF YOU GO

What: Cincinnati May Festival 2003 When/where: 8 p.m. in Music Hall. Cathedral Basilica Concert is at 7 p.m. Subscriptions: $21-$214; Festival Pass is $80 or $124; Cathedral Basilica tickets: $21. Music Hall single tickets ($11-$60) will go on sale in late April. 381-3300 or www.mayfestival.com. Complete list of programming

The special May 18 concert in Covington's Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption will feature the first Cincinnati performance of Benjamin Britten's Noah's Flood, a staging of the Noah's Ark story. Ed Stern, artistic director for Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, will stage the presentation, which will be a pageant similar to Cincinnati's Boar's Head Festival.

Among the large cast of children and adults will be bass-baritone John Cheek in the role of Noah, and the Starling Chamber Orchestra, in its festival debut.

Second weekend

The second weekend opens May 23 with "Encores and Premieres," including the world premiere of Liszt's oratorio, St. Stanislaus. Liszt's third oratorio was to be on the life of St. Stanislaus, an 11th-century bishop and patron saint of Poland, but the composer died before he could finish it. Paul Munson, a musicologist at Union University, Jackson, Tenn., recently finished a performing version of the first and fourth scenes. (The work's middle two scenes are missing.)

Mr. Conlon was immediately interested in the project when Mr. Munson approached him to perform the world premiere.

"I love the religious Liszt; there's something very moving about it," Mr. Conlon says. Performing such a work for the first time, from the end of Liszt's life, is "like seeing into the workshop," he adds. "We put these people's lives back together as puzzles, and they're fascinating."

And, because the May Festival has been in the forefront of premiering works, Mr. Conlon is revisiting some premieres of the past: Gian Carlo Menotti's The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi (1963); Britten's Prelude to Gloriana (1956); and Alvin Singleton's Praisemaker (1998). He'll also recap Beethoven's Coriolan Overture, performed in the festival's first Music Hall performance in 1878.

The evening's soloists will be mezzo-soprano Kristine Jepson and baritone Donnie Ray Albert.

And in conclusion

The festival will conclude with a Russian Night, anchored by the Prologue and Coronation Scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. That program will include three works that are new to the festival: Shostakovich's Festive Overture and The Execution of Stepan Razin and Rachmaninoff's Three Russian Songs, Op. 41. Mr. Cheek and Mr. Albert will perform as soloists.

It's a "big sing" for the 150-voice, all-volunteer May Festival Chorus, who "have a lot of Russian to learn," Mr. Conlon says.

Mr. Conlon, 52, who is anticipating his 25th season with the May Festival next year, finished his 13-year tenure as music director in Cologne, Germany, last summer. When he leaves his Paris Opera post of principal conductor at the end of 2003-04, he will have had the longest tenure of any conductor there (nine years).

Nevertheless, his schedule has not slowed. Mr. Conlon squeezed in a Cincinnati stop while conducting Poulenc's Dialogues des Carmelites at the Metropolitan Opera. He recently led orchestral concerts in Munich, Cologne and Boston.

He considers last year's May Festival theme, "Beethoven, Bernstein & Brotherhood," a success, and plans to revisit themes of diversity in the future.

"I was really happy that it moved a lot of people," Mr. Conlon says. "I think it made an important step on an important issue."

E-mail jgelfand@enquirer.com