Met’s Donald Palumbo, living the dream as an in-demand chorus master

Donald Palumbo has had a dream career, and he knows it. He has served as chorus master at some of the world’s biggest and most prestigious music organizations, including the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Salzburg Festival and Metropolitan Opera, his current post. “I’ve been extremely lucky,” he said. 

Palumbo is returning to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a second time, serving as guest chorus master for Riccardo Muti’s final subscription concerts June 23-25 as music director. For these milestone performances, Muti will lead Beethoven’s towering choral work, Missa solemnis, which the composer completed in 1823, four years before his death.

The veteran chorus master described the mass setting as one of the great masterpieces of Western civilization. “When you listen to it, you can’t sit back and just let the music wash over you and be impressed by the fortes, like the Dies Irae in a Verdi Requiem,” he said. “It’s just extremely cerebral in its way, yet so heartfelt and emotional. I just find it to be an amazing piece of music.”

Palumbo’s career has had what he called a “strange trajectory,” because he graduated with a bachelor’s degree not in music but in chemistry in 1970 from Boston University. He learned his musical skills essentially on the job, starting as a rehearsal pianist and then preparing choruses for small opera companies. In the 1980s, he served as an assistant at the Dallas Opera to Roberto Benaglio, who became his most important mentor. Benaglio had been chorus master at La Scala, Milan’s celebrated opera house, and he was one of several Italians in major positions with the Dallas company at the time. “They used to call it the La Scala of the West,” Palumbo said, “because it was just purely Italian.”

After serving as chorus master with several opera companies, including the Opera Theatre of St. Louis, and music director of the Boston Chorus Pro Musica in 1980-90, he was appointed chorus master of Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1991. “It was the best time,” he said. “Luckily, I was able to be there for the last years of Ardis Krainik’s term as general director of the company, and she was just an amazing administrator. Everybody loved her. She created this great atmosphere, where everyone loved coming to work everyday, and everyone worked so hard.”

“Missa solemnis is just extremely cerebral in its way, yet so heartfelt and emotional.” — Donald Palumbo

In the summers, Palumbo worked at festivals in Europe, including collaborations with famed early-music conductor John Eliot Gardiner. In 1999, he became the first American chorus master of the Salzburg Festival. Then, after serving as guest chorus master for two productions, New York’s Metropolitan Opera named him as its chorus master in 2006. He took up the position a year later, forcing him to say farewell to Lyric and resign his Salzburg post. “As much as I loved Chicago,” he said, “I don’t think you can say no to the Met.”

After the pandemic, many opera companies across the United States are struggling financially, including the Met, which has had to raid its endowment fund and reduce the number of its performances in 2023-24 by 10 percent. Palumbo attributes part of the attendance downturn to a decline in the number of superstar singers. “We don’t have these names that will sell out the Bohèmes, Aidas and Carmens, and I certainly grew up in the days where there were those superstars,” he said. “So if you can’t fill the house for traditional repertoire now, you’ve got to go elsewhere, and that’s what we’ve been doing at the Met.”

To that end, the company has turned to contemporary opera, which has proven to be a big draw in recent years. It is commissioning new works, and in 2023-24, it will feature company premieres of Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking (2000) and Anthony Davis’ X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (1986). Palumbo made special mention of the Met’s repeat presentations of Philip Glass’ famed operas, Satyagraha (1979) and Akhnaten (1973), which are fast becoming modern classics.

“Those productions are two of my best moments at the Met,” he said. “Quite frankly, it was music I didn’t have much affinity for until I started studying it. Once you get into the music and once you have a great cast and a great stage director, they were just incredible experiences.”

Following the retirement of Duain Wolfe, director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus since 1994, Palumbo served as guest chorus master for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus’ concert performances of Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera in June 2022 under Muti. He first met Muti early in his career through his mentor, Benaglio, but the two never had a chance to work together until a 2010 Met production of Verdi’s Attila, with the famed conductor in the pit. “We had a wonderful relationship,” Palumbo said. “It was an extremely important production in my life, to do a Verdi opera with a conductor like Muti.”

They talked about collaborating again, but a reunion didn’t happen until Un ballo in maschera with the CSO. “It was a great experience. The concerts went very well, and I had such a wonderful time,” Palumbo said. After that 2022 program, Muti asked Palumbo if we would return for Missa solemnis. “And, of course, I jumped at the chance to do this piece with that orchestra and chorus and Maestro Muti,” he said. “I’m really excited about the whole project.”

Palumbo came to Chicago in April for early rehearsals of Missa solemnis, where he introduced the work to the chorus and discussed its many complexities, including its fugues, which are crucial to the piece. In some cases, he sat at a keyboard so he could illustrate his points and highlight phrases. “The end of the Gloria, the end of Credo, are some of the most complex pieces of choral writing of any period, quite frankly,” he said.

Following sectional rehearsals, which have been handled by CSO chorus staff, he returned for more full rehearsals, first with piano and then the orchestra with Muti. “I have to be constantly listening and figuring out ways to improve things that need tweaking,” he said. Sometimes he sends written notes to the singers and sometimes he schedules a quick “brush-up” session with them to work through a troublesome section before the next rehearsal.

Palumbo has nothing but praise for the chorus, which was formed in 1957 by legendary conductor Margaret Hillis at the behest of Fritz Reiner, then music director of the CSO. The new ensemble debuted a year later in  Mozart’s Requiem with guest conductor Bruno Walter, and Hillis went on to serve as its director through 1994.

“They’re amazing,” Palumbo said. “They’re absolutely amazing. They have been singing together for so long that their sense of blend and their sense of breathing together and attacking is superb. I’m sure this is a leftover from the Margaret Hillis days. It’s just an extremely disciplined chorus.”