Back in Chicago, Donald Palumbo states CSO post ‘is the ideal job for me’

When Donald Palumbo stepped down in June 2024 as chorus master of the Metropolitan Opera, it seemed safe to assume that he would retire. After all, he had been working for five decades and owned a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a perfect desert retreat.  

“The pressures and the constant performance schedule — it never lets up at the Met,” he said. “I just felt that I had done everything that I wanted to do in opera, and I just wanted a break from the constant 24/7 that the job at the Met entails.”

But Palumbo didn’t retire. Instead, he just switched gears, and keeping as busy as ever doing what at first what he calls “projects,” which generally meant taking on freelance assignments preparing choruses for various operatic and concert performances. He returned to the Met for its production of Aida at the end of 2024, collaborated twice with the Philadelphia Orchestra and spent a month in Japan as part of a presentation of La Traviata with the Seiji Ozawa Music Foundation. There also has been teaching, his actual summer coaching with the Santa Fe Opera Apprentice Program for Singers, and working in June with the pre-professional singers in Lyric’s Ryan Opera Center, including conducting scenes in workshops of Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Montemezzi’s L’amore dei tre re.

“I never thought I would stop working,” he said. “It’s not a profession that you really just stop. It consumes your life when you are in the middle of it, and it’s pretty hard to cut it out completely when you are so-called retired.”

It’s hardly surprising, then, that Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association turned to this musical Energizer Bunny to become the third person to lead the Chicago Symphony Chorus since its founding in 1958. Margaret Hillis, the legendary conductor who established the ensemble, served as chorus director through 1994, and her successor, Duain Wolfe, retired in 2022 after 28 seasons. Palumbo’s three-year appointment as chorus director was announced in June, and he got right to work in July, preparing the singers for a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) as part of the CSO’s summer residency at the Ravinia Festival.

Palumbo never thought he would take on another full-time role, but unlike the Met post, which placed nearly constant demands on him, the CSO position is structured in a way that gives him more freedom. “It’s the right amount of time commitment,” he said. “And I love working with this chorus. I love the organization. And the orchestra is just the best ... what can you say? This really is the ideal job for me.”

Palumbo’s first set concerts at Symphony Center as chorus director will come Nov. 20-23 when he prepares the Chicago Symphony Chorus for a program that includes Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Requiem, K. 626, with guest conductor Manfred Honeck. Left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death on Dec. 5, 1791, this setting of the mass for the dead has nonetheless gone on to claim a place among the composer’s most revered creations. At the behest of Mozart’s wife, Constanze, it was completed by one of the composer’s students, Franz Xaver Süssmayr.

That Mozart’s Requiem is such a familiar work and is performed regularly by the CSO Chorus offers both “pluses and minuses” as Palumbo begins to prepare for the performances when rehearsals begin Oct. 20. One of the pluses, he said, is he won’t have to spend as much time teaching notes and helping the singers negotiate some of the work’s tricky fugues.

One of the minuses will be the challenge of switching the singers’ approach to fit Honeck’s singular take on Mozart, which Palumbo knows from working with the conductor at the Met. “His Mozart would be miles away from, say, Maestro [James] Levine’s Mozart or Maestro [Herbert] von Karajan’s Mozart. It’s more vertical. It’s more rhythmic. It’s not sentimental. It’s clean. It’s active. So, passages that we are used to singing a little more legato or sustained, we’re going to have to inject with more rhythmic, vertical energy.”

"It’s more vertical. It’s more rhythmic. It’s not sentimental. It’s clean. It’s active. So, passages that we are used to singing a little more legato or sustained, we’re going to have to inject with more rhythmic, vertical energy.” — Donald Palumbo on Manfred Honeck’s view of Mozart’s Requiem

It’s not hard to understand why Palumbo was chosen for the job. Quite simply, there are very few if any conductors in the world who can match his resume, which includes stints as chorus master of Lyric Opera of Chicago for 16 years and then moving to the Met in 2007. His impact at the New York opera company was summed up in the headline on a 2024 New York Times article about his departure: “He Made the Met Opera’s Chorus the Best in the World.”

And if all that wasn’t enough, Palumbo proved that he could work his magic with the CSO, serving as guest chorus master for three sets of CSO performances last season, including Verdi’s Requiem with conductor Riccardo Muti.

Several qualities about the Chicago Symphony Chorus appealed to Palumbo, starting with what he called the group’s “scrupulous musicianship” — its attention to the smallest detail in a score. Another quality he found “immediately amazing” is that the singers don’t lag behind the beat. “That, I’m sure, was instilled by Margaret [Hillis],” he said. “That style of attack is pretty ingrained once you understand it, and once you practice it. That was the first thing I noticed immediately when I worked with them.” Finally, he was impressed by the group’s focus and commitment both in rehearsals and performances.

In a certain way, Palumbo’s appointment brings the history of the Chicago Symphony Chorus full circle, because he knew Hillis. His tenure at Lyric overlapped with hers at the CSO. “She could not have been nicer to me as I was figuring out the lay of the land in Chicago, chorally, so to speak,” Palumbo said.

At one point, she invited him to join her at some auditions. “We sat together and listened to a lot of singers, and we talked a lot about singing and the ins and outs of choral work,” he said. He also recalls attending CSO concerts for which she prepared the chorus, including one of the Chicago concert performances of Otello in April 1991 (two took place in Orchestra Hall and two at New York’s Carnegie Hall) that marked the conclusion of Sir Georg Solti’s 22 seasons as music director. The program, which was recorded live for Decca Records, featured famed tenor Luciano Pavarotti in the title role.

“She was something else,” Palumbo said of Hillis. “She was an amazing musician but also a personality — a really wonderful person.”

Although Palumbo has spent the bulk of his career in opera, he nonetheless knows most of the orchestral choral repertoire very well. In 1980, he took over as music director of Boston’s Chorus Pro Musica, where he had previously sung as a tenor. The group gained early fame when it joined forces with the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s to premiere Francis Poulenc’s Gloria in 1961.

During his tenure, the chorus collaborated with the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra and Pittsburgh Symphony during its summer residences under Michael Tilson Thomas. In addition, the Met Orchestra and Chorus have performed multiple large-scale choral works under its current music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

And if all that experience wasn’t enough, Palumbo recalls singing in many choral masterworks, including Mozart’s Requiem, as a member of the Vienna Singverein, the concert choir of the Vienna Musikverein, under von Karajan and other now-legendary conductors.

Palumbo plans to continue living in Santa Fe, and fly in for the chorus’ weekly rehearsals on Mondays and Tuesdays when they are preparing for a program, and he will be around every day during the chorus’ rehearsals with the orchestra and the ultimate performances. He plans to stay with his sister, who lives in Evanston, enjoying some quiet time in the car rides downtown.

As noted, the first rehearsal for the Mozart Requiem program is set for Oct 20, and he believes it’s important for him to be there right from the start, making sure nothing is slipping by and no “bad habits” are creeping in. He wants to make sure right away, for example, that every note of the “tricky passing tones” in a fugue in the early Kyrie section are exactly right. “So, I put a lot of value in the initial rehearsals for something,” he said. “I’ve learned how to pace the rehearsal process for a piece and make sure you don’t move through too quickly and with any degree of sloppiness.”

One of the most important steps in the chorus’ preparation is the initial piano rehearsal with the conductor who will lead the program. “Finally, we get to see how our preparation meshes with his concept of the piece,” he said. Whenever possible during the orchestral rehearsals and the warm-ups for the performances, Palumbo gives “notes” to the chorus, a reminder about how a transition should be done or a suggestion on how to improve a particular section from the performance before. If he can’t talk to singers directly, he sometimes even passes along written notes.

“It’s important to have constant interaction with the chorus,” he said. “You can’t just turn a chorus over to a conductor in his first rehearsal and then disappear. It’s our job to fix everything and maintain the standard as the run progresses.”

And by “standard,” Palumbo means the world-class standard that has defined his entire career.