The Cincinnati May Festival announced today a two-year contract extension for Robert Porco, Director of Choruses, through the end of the 2020 May Festival.

Porco has served in that role since 1989, preparing the volunteer May Festival Chorus for hundreds of performances for the festival, as well as for concerts with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and the Cincinnati Pops.

Porco will perform a key role as part of a new leadership model for the May Festival, the nation’s oldest continuous choral festival. He is sharing leadership duties with the new Principal Conductor Juanjo Mena, who will be leading his first festival this year, as well as a rotating Creative Partner to be named for each festival.

In addition to preparing the May Festival Chorus for performances, Porco will conduct the “Bernstein at the Basilica” concert this Sunday, April 22 at the Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, Kentucky, and a rare performance of Leonard Bernstein’s MASS on May 19 at Music Hall.

In addition, James Bagwell, who has led the May Festival Youth Chorus since 1997, is stepping down. For more than a decade, he has flown to Cincinnati from New York for Sunday Youth Chorus rehearsals during the year. He is a well-regarded conductor of choral, operatic and orchestral repertoire as well as the director of the music program at Bard College in New York.

Porco said of Bagwell, “James has mentored and inspired hundreds of young singers during his tenure. He has been and will remain a valued colleague.”

His successor is Matthew Swanson, an adjunct instructor at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, who is taking on the Youth Chorus and many other duties in a new position of associate director of choruses.

Swanson, who earned graduate degrees in conducting and choral music at CCM, will lead community outreach activities, including a new May Festival Community Chorus and the Bernstein Mass Street Choir.

He was a choral conducting fellow in the 2016-17 season. The festival has also chosen a new conducting fellow, Hyejung Jun. She will be assisting Porco and Swanson.

For season information, visit mayfestival.com.