Leaving a place where your colleagues in academia went boogie-boarding in the Pacific Ocean every Friday morning can’t be an easy thing to do.
And so it was for Karen Kennedy, who left her job at the University of Hawaii-Manoa and directorship of the Honolulu Symphony Chorus to come back to the mainland, first to Baltimore, and then to Miami.
“It was very hard for me to leave. It was like a spiritual connection to that island,” Kennedy said. “And I had a fantasy that living in South Florida would be like that, with the palm trees and stuff.”
Not so much.
“Different pace,” she said. “I’m adapting.”
Tonight, Kennedy makes her first appearance as conductor of the Master Chorale of South Florida in a holiday-themed concert accompanied by members of the Miami Symphony Orchestra. The 90-member chorus will tackle seasonal pieces such as James Bassi’s Carol Symphony and a medley of holiday songs, as well as Eric Whitacre’s Lux aurumque. Also, the orchestra will play Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.
But the big piece on the program will be the Magnificat of J.S. Bach (BWV 243). A joyous but difficult work, it’s also usually done with smaller forces than the Fort Lauderdale-based Master Chorale normally summons. Kennedy said it’s important for the singers to learn the correct approach for the music, whose contrapuntal textures are, she said, like “weaving lace.”
“The thing that’s hard for professionals is, ‘We’re going to do Bach with 90 people? He wouldn’t have done it with 90 people. Bach’s choir was so small,’” she said, her voice feigning musicological outrage. “Well, yeah. But how else is this group going to experience this? …. We’re going to do it the best we can with a huge herd, and we’re going to have to lighten up. We can’t sing this like it’s Verdi.
“So they’re learning how to be a 90-voice Bach choir,” she said. “Not an easy task.”
The soloists for the Magnificat will be soprano Ah Hong, mezzo-soprano Misty Bermudez, tenor Tony Boutté, and baritone David Newman.
Kennedy, 41, who hails from Rochester, N.Y., was always interested in being a musician, and like many young pianists with some ability, she found herself conducting from time to time while doing musical theater and other such activities.
“Having an instrument that’s alive is a whole different ballgame,” she said.
But it wasn’t until she saw a choir director working at an all-state competition in her high school that she started to think about conducting.
“That was the first time I thought that could be something I want to do,” Kennedy said. “I didn’t even know that could be a job. I thought, ‘That’s a job? I want that to be my job.’”
She earned her bachelor’s at DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., then her master’s at nearby Butler University, and began teaching high school. When her parents moved to Arizona, she followed them, and ended up in a doctoral program at Arizona State University, where she was encouraged to become a professional choral conductor.
Armed with her doctorate, she won the job in Hawaii, where she worked for six years. In 2006, she became the director of choral activities at Towson University in Baltimore, where she led four different choirs. She was appointed director of the Master Chorale in May after the departure of Joshua Habermann, a good friend of Kennedy’s, who now leads the Dallas Symphony Chorus.
“It’s all been this incredible, wonderful cosmic accident. And I’m so grateful. It’s better than I would have planned,” she said. “I never thought I would be running a doctoral program in Miami. But it’s absolutely the right thing.”
In person, Kennedy is vibrant, engaging and warm, one of those leaders whose strength lies partly in her charm, which masks her formidable knowledge of the repertoire and her long experience. She inspires devotion and loyalty in the singers she’s led, as evidenced by a fan page on Facebook called I Want to Be Dr. Karen Kennedy When I Grow Up.
“She is funny, kind, and when you go on stage you’re prepared,” one of her singers in Hawaii wrote this month. “O’ahu nearly sank into the Pacific when she left.”
Kennedy is married to a fellow musician, Corin Overland, who has just completed a Ph.D. in conducting at Temple University and hopes to soon join his wife in Miami. “I text him a picture of a palm tree everyday,” she said.
Under its previous leaders, Jo-Michael Scheibe and Habermann, the chorus performed many of the box-office biggies of the choral world, including the Mozart Requiem and the C minor Mass, the Requiems of Brahms, Faure and Verdi, Haydn’s Creation, Mendlessohn’s Elijah and Orff’s Carmina Burana. It also has sung backup twice to the Italian popera tenor Andrea Bocelli.
While some of the decisions, including the programming of the Magnificat, were in place when Kennedy took over, she said this year she’s having the chorus do a wider variety of small works, such as the Whitacre, a composer the chorus was eager to perform.
“This is a departure for them. And then in the spring, for the program they did have in place, they said, ‘What if we did stick with the smaller works? What would you do?’” Kennedy said.
The result was a program called Royal Flush, featuring music by and for royalty. The April 20-22 concerts will feature the Coronation Mass of Mozart (in C, K. 317); choral pieces from Britten’s Gloriana, an opera written for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II; and John Rutter’s This Is the Day, composed earlier this year for the wedding of the queen’s grandson, William the Duke of Cambridge.
In addition, there will be two of the Coronation Anthems by Handel (written for the coronation of King George II), and songs by King Henry VIII and the Hawaiian Queen Lili’uokalani.
“Next year we’re going to go back to the big works. But this is a transition year, and this is stuff they’ve never sung. And it’s good pedagogically to sing this stuff … We have a lot of different colors to work with,” she said.
Kennedy has big plans for the chorale. She’s thinking about programming Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms for the 2013-14 season, and she’d like to pursue a fund-raising campaign to send the chorus on a European tour.
“I would love us to travel. I think it would be amazing to take this group somewhere huge,” she said, adding that she took one of her Hawaiian choirs to Carnegie Hall. “I would love this group to be able to go somewhere and do this music in the cathedrals of Europe.”
That would be fitting, she said, for a group with such strong support from its members. Originally the chorus of the Florida Philharmonic, its singers insisted on keeping the group going after the orchestra failed in 2003.
Kennedy said the Master Chorale is an assembly of people who are there for the love of the art form, and participating in the music often serves as a welcome respite from difficult careers.
“They’re music teachers and lawyers and doctors, and they have this one night a week where they come together and do this. And so many of them have said, ‘This is so important to me. This allows me to do my day job. This is the reason I can do what I do during the day,’” she said.
“I just got a little card from a lady the other night, and she said, ‘You know, I take care of very sick people all day. This allows me to do that.’ It’s so important, and you forget that sometimes when you’re a professional musician.”
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The Master Chorale of South Florida and the Miami Symphony perform Bach to the Holidays at 8 tonight at the Second Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, at 8 p.m. Saturday in the Wold Performing Arts Center at Lynn University in Boca Raton, and at 4 p.m. Sunday at the First United Methodist Church of Coral Gables. Tickets are $30 in advance and $35 at the door. Call 954-418-6232 or visit www.masterchoraleofsouthflorida.org.