Bagwell a Rising Star
The Cincinnati May Festival is a starry place, with conductors, soloists and the May Festival Chorus recognized worldwide. It takes talent to keep those standards high.
One of those talents is James Bagwell, director of the May Festival Youth Chorus. Known and treasured for 15 years in Cincinnati, Bagwell has steadily seen his own star rise on the national scene
Make that international. In July, he will take New York’s Collegiate Chorale, of which he is music director, to Tel Aviv to perform with Zubin Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic. They will perform four concerts there (one to be led by Riccardo Muti), then head to the Salzburg Festival in Austria with the same program (including Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service, Bruckner’s "Te Deum" and "Kol Nidre" by Schoenberg). The Collegiate Chorale (founded by Robert Shaw in 1941), will be the first American chorus invited to participate in the Salzburg Festival in over 20 years. They will perform Bloch’s Sacred Service with Mehta and the Israel Philharmonic July 25 at the Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg with famed baritone Thomas Hampson.
Bagwell, who is the de facto chorus master of New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, will be back in New York in August to help close the 2012 festival with Beethoven’s rarely performed Mass in C Major, Op, 86, with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra and Concert Chorale of New York, led by music director Louis Langrée. (Langrée was named 13th music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra April 25, his tenure to begin with the 2013-2014 season.)
And that is not all. Bagwell is professor of music and chairman of the music department at Bard College, where he teaches conducting, and principal guest conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. He lives in Hudson, New York, just north of Bard and has an apartment in New York City. He is married to mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz, herself a busy artist on the opera and concert scene. (Buchholz was soloist in Brahms’ “Liebeslieder Waltzes” with the CSO led by Robert Porco and is also featured on the world premiere recording of Liszt’s “St. Stanislaus” by James Conlon, the May Festival Chorus and the CSO.)
When Music in Cincinnati caught up with him, Bagwell was just off the plane from New York, heading for opening night of the May Festival (May 11) and his Youth Chorus, whom he will conduct at 8 p.m. tonight at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington. The 58-member Youth Chorus will open the concert with sacred motets by Arvo Pärt, Heinrich Schütz, Maurice Duruflé and Thomas Tallis, The concert, an annual non-subscription event by the May Festival, will also include two of the “Quatro Pezzi Sacri” by Verdi (“Ave Maria” and “Laudi alla Vergine Maria”) and the oratorio “Jephthe” by 17th-century Italian composer Giacomo Carissimi, to be sung by the May Festival Chamber Choir led by Conlon, with soloists Heidi Grant Murphy (soprano), Hana Park (mezzo-soprano), John Aler (tenor) and Yohan Yi (bass.).
Bagwell commutes about twice a month to Cincinnati for the Youth Chorus’ Sunday afternoon rehearsals. “It’s a second home for me,” he said. He is assisted by David Kirkendall, choral music teacher at Princeton High School, whom he calls “fantastic.” “He and I are sort of a team. We did Arts Wave Sampler (Greater Cincinnati’s annual fund-raising campaign for the arts), ‘Carolfest’ with the May Festival Chorus, and then I did ‘Messiah’ (Handel) with the CSO in December.” For ten years, Bagwell worked with the late Cincinnati Pops conductor Erich Kunzel at Riverbend with the May Festival Summer Chorus (“I miss him very much; he was really great to me,” said Bagwell).
Working with a young chorus (the May Festival Youth Chorus is open by audition to singers in grades 9-12 from area schools) differs from working with adults, Bagwell said. To begin with, “they’re very fast. They pick up languages fast. And they’re special because everything they do is their first time (including this year’s May Festival opening, “Carmina Burana” May 11). One of the things I’m trying to teach them is how to sing in an ensemble, what it means to be in an ensemble. A lot of these kids have fairly substantive voices for their age. I try to teach them how to rein it in and be an ensemble player.”
Certain repertoire fits young voices, Bagwell said. “The Renaissance pieces work especially well, that’s why I always do a lot of that music. Plus it teaches them how to be independent. There’s not just soprano on top and harmony underneath. They each have responsibility for their own specific contrapuntal line. The altos have just as much work to as the sopranos do.” A case in point is Tallis’ “Loquebantur variis linguis,” to be heard on tonight’s Basilica concert. “It’s text is ‘Behold, I speak in tongues,’ and it’s all split, with divided soprano, divided alto, divided bass. I think, too, that young kids do very well with 20th and 21st-century repertoire. Hard stuff, dissonant stuff they do very well with. They have no prejudices, no preconceived notions. They like those different kinds of sounds. Nineteenth-century music is hard, because you really need a developed voice for that. So I steer away from Brahms and works like that. It’s too heavy for them.”
There is an ear training and sight reading class a half-hour before each Youth Chorus rehearsal (led by Kirkendall), and “I’m always talking to them about the historical context of the piece, the meaning of the words, the language. All is just part of the way I teach,” Bagwell said.
Bagwell, a native of Alabama who did his undergraduate work at Birmingham-Southern University, loves to prepare choruses, he said. “It’s a great challenge, and it gives me an opportunity to work with a lot of other conductors. I’ve worked with a lot of fabulous musicians that, otherwise, I don’t think I would have been able to work with. That is fundamentally one of the great things about being a chorus master.” His mentor, he said was Robert Porco, director of choruses for the May Festival, whom he met while a graduate student in conducting at Indiana University in Bloomington.
He calls Porco “the best teacher I ever had” and “without question, one of the finest choral conductors in the country. He got me here with the May Festival Youth Chorus. I owe him everything.”
A voice and piano major at Birmingham-Southern, Bagwell grew up in a small farming community in Alabama. “My mother is still there, my sister is there. My father was a farmer, my grandfather was a farmer and my great-grandfather was a farmer.” He got his inspiration for music from a choral director in high school and from seeing pianist Arthur Rubenstein on television. “I thought, ‘I want to be like that guy.’ I thought he was the suavist, most debonair pianist.” He pursued piano in college, then got bit by the conducting bug. “I did a lot of piano, all the things one does, recitals, competitions and all that. I’m glad I had the skill, but I really wanted to be a conductor.”
He knew he wanted to conduct by the time he graduated. “I wanted to be a choral conductor because of the person at my college, Hugh Thomas (conductor of the famed Birmingham Concert Chorale). There are three major choral influences in my life and he is one of them (Porco and Robert Shaw were the others, “not in any particular order,” he said). He (Thomas) was a force of nature, one of the finest choral musicians I ever met. He knew literature, art, theater – he was able to bring out performances from a bunch of undergraduates that I’ve never heard.”
From Alabama, Bagwell headed to IU where he began doing orchestral conducting. “Pianists wanted somebody to do their concertos and they asked me. Then in Tulsa (with the Light Opera Company) I was 30 times a month down in the orchestra pit. That’s the way to learn how to conduct.”
Part of Bagwell’s philosophy about teaching conducting, he said, “is that I don’t think there should be a delineation between being a choral conductor, an orchestral conductor or an opera conductor. I think one is a conductor and needs to be flexible in all those areas. I’ve done opera, musical theater, a little bit of everything. I was on television with (singer/actor) Michael Bublé in December. I got called to be part of this TV thing for NBC, so I went back to the orchestra. My mother was very happy to see me on television.”
After the May Festival, Bagwell returns to New York to prepare for a concert with the Collegiate Chorale. Then he will embark on a West Coast tour with singer Natalie Merchant. “We’ll be in San Francisco and Seattle (with the Seattle and San Francisco Symphonies) so I’ll get to work with Natalie and some great orchestras.”
Bagwell is very proud of his chorus in Cincinnati, he said. Some have gone on to sing in the adult chorus, some have gone on to study music. “We have a singer who is a member of the Young Artists program at Houston Grand Opera, and one of my former students is coming to Bard in the fall as a conducting student.” Bagwell has never stopped being a student himself, he said. “I was in rehearsal and saw Bob Porco working last Sunday. I still learn. I like to come in and watch, just to remind myself. It’s like a singer going back and having a lesson with his/her teacher. You sort of slip back and remind yourself of that.”
The May Festival continues at 8 p.m. tonight at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington. Bagwell and May Festival music director James Conlon will conduct the May Festival Youth Chorus and May Festival Chamber Choir, respectively. Tickets are $35 at the door. For more information, visit www.mayfestival.com