Lyric Opera of Chicago names Donald Nally
new chorus master starting with
the 2007-08 season


William Mason, general director of Lyric Opera of Chicago, has named Donald Nally the company’s new chorus master beginning with the 2007-08 season. Nally has served as chorus master for Welsh National Opera, Opera Company of Philadelphia, and the Spoleto festivals of Italy and the U.S.
 
Nally is scheduled to start at Lyric on May 1. He replaces Donald Palumbo, Lyric’s chorus master since 1991.

Donald Nally has served the last three seasons as chorus master for Welsh National Opera, with which he continues his association as a guest artist. This season he conducted Chorus! at WNO, a show he created with director David Pountney. Nally returns to WNO in the spring to collaborate with conductor Carlo Rizzi on a series of concerts featuring the world-famous WNO chorus in works of Verdi, Berlioz, Walton, and James MacMillan, a composer with whom Nally is closely associated, having conducted American premieres of his works. Nally has conducted the WNO chorus and orchestra in the major cities of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.

This season he was guest conductor for London’s renowned Philharmonia Chorus and chorus master for a massed-choir performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with four Welsh choruses, Sinfonia Cymru, and soloists including bass-baritone Bryn Terfel.  

From August 1992 through December 2003, Nally was chorus master at the Opera Company of Philadelphia and choirmaster at Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia. He was artistic director of the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia for four seasons, during which it received America’s highest award in choral music, Chorus America’s 2002 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence.

Nally served as chorus master for the Spoleto festivals of Italy and the U.S. (1989-91), and served as director of choruses at the Italian Spoleto Festival from 1993-98 and again in 2001.

Nally has collaborated with many of the world’s great conductors and directors, including Gian Carlo Menotti, Carlo Rizzi, Richard Hickox, Vladimir Jurowski, Sir Charles Mackerras, Alexander Polianichko, Spiros Argiris, Günther Kramer, Richard Jones, Filippo Sanjust, and Giulio Chazalette. He has conducted premieres of composers John Musto, Jonathan Harvey, Jake Heggie, David Shapiro, Sharon Hershey, Robert Maggio, Robert Convery, Howard Yermish, Gabriel Jackson, and Benjamin C.S. Boyle.

Although he’s worked on well over 100 standard-repertory and contemporary opera productions over the years, Nally has not collaborated previously with Lyric’s music director, Sir Andrew Davis, nor with the other conductors and stage directors scheduled for Lyric’s 2007-08 season, which will be announced in January.

“I couldn’t be more excited about joining Lyric; everything I’ve seen or experienced there is absolutely first class. Many of the artists will be new to me, so I look forward to many new artistic friendships,” Nally says. “Chicago is a great town with a great opera company that has a great chorus and orchestra; there’s another great orchestra in town, and a great arts community in general – what’s not to like? I love collaborating, and the drama of making drama. I know that Lyric’s chorus shares my concerns that the chorus always be a dramatic character whose music is born from the drama, that the work be organic, that it always has a purpose. I have already seen from Bill Mason and Andrew Davis that they are collaborators by nature, with the highest goals.”

Says Mason, “We’re delighted to have found someone with Donald Nally’s experience and credentials to take the position. He has an excellent reputation, and we’re confident he will maintain the high standards that we’ve enjoyed from our chorus for the past several years. We’re very much looking forward to working with him.”

Nally conducts The Crossing, a professional chamber choir in Philadelphia specializing in new music, recently reviewed by David Patrick Stearns in the Philadelphia Inquirer as “an answered prayer.” The ensemble’s 18 singers live around the country and converge to perform as personal schedules permit. This Friday’s scheduled concert features works of several contemporary opera composers who also write regularly for the church, including James MacMillan, Jonathan Dove, and a new work written for the group by Benjamin C.S. Boyle.

Nally’s various choirs (including the Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia, the Opera Company of Philadelphia chorus, the choir of St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia, The Bridge Ensemble, and The Crossing, among others) have performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Pennsylvania Ballet, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, Musica Pacifica, the Luciano Pavarotti International Vocal Competition Galas, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and Coro Vico Alto’s International Festival in Siena. They have also been invited to sing concerts and services of contemporary music for the national conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Association of Lutheran Church Musicians; his conducting was featured seven times on National Public Radio’s The First Art, including the rare occasion of an entire broadcast devoted to a single work sung by a single choir; Duruflé’s Requiem with the Spoleto Festival Chorus and Orchestra. Nally’s work can be heard on the Chandos label in recordings of Menotti’s music: an Opera News review of The Saint of Bleecker Street called the recording “most remarkable” for the “superb singing” of the chorus. In 2002, a Philadelphia music critic dubbed Nally “the choral czar of Philadelphia.”

Born in 1960 in Hilltown (Bucks County), Pennsylvania, Donald Nally holds degrees from the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati, Westminster Choir College in Princeton, New Jersey, and University of Illinois, where he earned his doctor of musical arts degree in 1995. He is returning to Chicago, as his first position following undergraduate school was as music department chair at The Chicago Academy for the Arts.
 

The Howard A. Stotler Chorus Master Endowed Chair