Artistic Staff
David Hoose has been Music Director of Cantata Singers for thirty years. When he became the ensemble’s sixth music director, in 1984, he had already appeared as guest conductor during each of the three previous seasons and, before that, had performed with the ensemble on several occasions as horn player. Mr. Hoose also serves as Music Director of Collage New Music, a position he has held since 1987; with Collage he also had established a relationship before becoming its director, having conducted the ensemble many times. Since 1987, he has been Director of Orchestras at the Boston University School of Music, where he is Professor of Music. From 1994 to 2005, he was also Music Director of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Hoose has appeared as guest conductor of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Philharmonic, Saint Louis Symphony, Utah Symphony, Korean Broadcasting Symphony (KBS), Orchestra Regionale Toscana (Italy), Quad Cities Symphony Orchestra, Ann Arbor Symphony, Opera Festival of New Jersey, and at the Warebrook, New Hampshire, Monadnock and Tanglewood music festivals. In Boston he has appeared as guest conductor with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players, Handel & Haydn Society, Back Bay Chorale, Chorus Pro Musica, and numerous times both with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and with Emmanuel Music. He has also conducted the new music ensembles Auros, Alea III, Dinosaur Annex, Fromm Chamber Players, and the Brandeis Contemporary Players.
As Professor of Music in the School of Music of Boston University, Mr. Hoose has mentored numerous young conductors who now serve in distinguished professional conducting positions, from professional orchestras and opera companies, college and youth orchestras, and major U.S. orchestras. He has conducted the orchestras of the Manhattan School, Shepherd School at Rice University, University of Southern California, and the Eastman School, and has been guest conductor several times at New England Conservatory. From 2006-2010, he served on the faculty of the Rose City International Conducting Workshop, in Portland, Oregon. For twenty summers he has conducted the Young Artists Orchestra at Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute. His own musical studies were at the Oberlin Conservatory (composition with Walter Aschaffenburg and Richard Hoffmann) and at Brandeis University (composition with Arthur Berger and Harold Shapero). He studied horn with Robert Fries (Philadelphia Orchestra), Barry Tuckwell, Joseph Singer (New York Philharmonic), and Richard Mackey (Boston Symphony Orchestra), and his principal conducting study was with Gustav Meier at the Tanglewood Music Center.
Mr. Hoose is recipient of Choral Arts New England’s 2008 Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award, the 2005 Alice M. Ditson Conductors Award for the Advancement of American Music, the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award (with the Emmanuel Wind Quintet), the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming (with Cantata Singers), and the Dmitri Mitropoulos Award at the Berkshire (Tanglewood) Music Center. His recording of John Harbison’s Mottetti di Montale, with Collage New Music, was a 2006 Grammy Nominee for Best Recording with Small Ensemble, and his recording with Collage of Donald Sur’s chamber works was recently released on Albany Records. Other recordings appear on the New World, Koch, Nonesuch, Delos, Composers’ Recordings (CRI), and GunMar, and Neuma labels.
During Mr. Hoose’s tenure as Cantata Singers Music Director, the organization has continued its devotion to the emotional, intellectual and spiritual riches found in the music of J.S. Bach, having performed more than thirty cantatas, most of the motets, several of the Lutheran masses, orchestral works, the Magnificat, the two passions, and the Mass in B minor, many of them several times. The ensemble has also enriched its commitment to music of our time, commissioning twelve works for chorus and orchestra, from ten composers: John Harbison (twice), Peter Child, Donald Sur, Andrew Imbrie, Andy Vores (twice), T.J. Anderson, James Primosch, Stephen Hartke, Lior Navok, and Yehudi Wyner. Many of these works respond to challenging issues: Sur’s Slavery Documents, Anderson’s Slavery Documents 2, and Navok’s Slavery Documents 3: The Trains Kept Coming…form the beginning of a stream of compositions that grapple with extraordinarily difficult subjects, American slavery and the Holocaust; Child’s Estrella protests 1980s American policy in Nicaragua; Harbison’s The Flight into Egypt suggests, through the metaphor of Mary and Joseph, the pain of the homeless; and Hartke’s Precepts, drawing upon Biblical verse, stands as a stern admonition against those who would use the Bible to hypocritical purpose. Cantata Singers has also commissioned three smaller works, one each from Edward Cohen, Thomas Oboe Lee, and Andy Vores, inspired by George Gershwin songs, and a brief a cappella work by William Cutter, in acknowledgement of Mr. Hoose’s twentieth anniversary as music director.
Under his leadership, Cantata Singers has also given premieres—world, U.S. and Boston—and first complete performances of a considerable body of music, including Igor Stravinsky’s Threni, Charles Fussell’s Specimen Days and High Bridge, Seymour Shifrin’s Cantata to the Texts of Sophoclean Choruses, Marjorie Merryman’s One Blood and Jonah, Harbison’s Four Psalms and Emerson, Sur’s Kumdori Tasaeng—The Birth of the Dream-Elf, Lacrimosa, and Sonnet 97, Earl Kim’s The Twenty-sixth Dream, Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 1, Die Propheten, The Legend of the Dead Soldier and The Lindbergh Flight, Nicholas Maw’s One Foot in Eden, Still, I Stand, and Heinrich Schütz’s Schwanengesang.
Cantata Singers has also explored a wide range of standard and not-so-standard repertoire, including the requiems by Mozart, Brahms, Verdi, Duruflé and Fauré, Die Schöpfung and Die Jahreszeiten of Haydn, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, several oratorios by Handel, Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s “Faust,” Schoenberg’s De Profundis, Friede auf Erden, Dreimal tausend Jahre, and the Kammersymphonie, op. 9, Dallapiccola’s Canti di Prigionia, Schreker’s Kammersymphonie, the Webern Kantate Nr. 1, Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies, and Stravinsky’s Les noces, Symphony of Psalms, Oedipus Rex, Mass, Requiem Canticles, Threni, Introitus, and The Rake’s Progress in staged performances.
For Cantata Singers, Mr. Hoose has created orchestrations of Irving Fine’s The Choral New Yorker, Charles Fussell’s Invocation, Johannes Brahms’ Geistliches Lied, Max Reger’s Canzone, scenes from Kurt Weill’s Der Weg der Verheissung, Charles Ives’ Psalm 90, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor, two orchestrations of Robert Schumann’s Vier Doppelchörige, and Franz Liszt’s Via Crucis. The four recent seasons that have focused, respectively, on the music and lives of Kurt Weill, Benjamin Britten, Heinrich Schütz, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, enabled a broad exploration of each composer’s work and brought a heightened urgency and continuity to more than two decades of already original and compelling programming.
Allison Voth
Chamber Series Music Director
Allison Voth is a well-known coach in New York and Boston. As répétiteur and/or diction coach she has worked with such companies as Boston Lyric Opera, Opera Boston, Opera Providence, Chautauqua Opera, Opera Aperta, Verismo Opera of New Jersey, Boston Baroque, and Opera North. Festivals at which she has worked include Opera Unlimited, the Florence Vocal Seminar and the Athens Music Festival. Ms. Voth, fast becoming recognized for her supertitles, has written titles for Opera Boston, Boston Baroque, Granite State Opera, Opera Providence, and Boston University’s Opera Institute. Ms.Voth is currently Principal Coach for Boston University's Opera Institute, and teaches English and French diction for both Boston University and The Boston Conservatory. As a champion of new music, Ms. Voth has performed and assisted in many premieres with Alea III, Collage New Music, The New Music Consort, The Group for Contemporary Players, and the National Orchestral Association New Music Project. She is a specialist in the music and literature of Paul Bowles, and produced and performed a multi-media performance entitled, Paul Bowles: One Man, Two Voices at Merkin Hall, New York. The EOS Ensemble consequently invited her to partake in their Paul Bowles Festival in New York where she premiered a set of piano preludes. Ms. Voth can be heard on CRI recordings.