David Hoose, Music Director
Cantata Singers & Ensemble
David Hoose has been Music Director of the Cantata Singers and Ensemble since 1984, during which time the group has continued its devotion to the works of J.S. Bach and has deepened its passion for music of our time. Under his leadership, the group has commissioned ten choral-orchestral compositions from nine significant American composers, and has performed a significant amount of other younger music, including that by Dallapiccola, Fine, Fussell, Harbison, Hindemith, Imbrie, Kim, Merryman, Schoenberg, Shifrin, Sur and Webern.
He has also led the group into less expected areas, mounting performances of works normally inaccessible to smaller choruses, including the Brahms and Verdi Requiems, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, and Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s “Faust,” as well as Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, Symphony of Psalms, and staged performances of The Rake’s Progress. Works that continue to be important to the organization under his leadership include some expected ones—Haydn’s The Creation, Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion—as well as less obvious ones—Stravinsky’s Les noces, Schoenberg’s De Profundis, Sur’s Slavery Documents, and unusual works of Schumann.
Mr. Hoose has also been Music Director of Collage New Music since 1991, an organization that has commissioned dozens of new works, premiered hundreds, and recorded many, including its recording of John Harbison’s Mottetti di Montale that was a 2005 Grammy Nominee for Best Performance by a Small Ensemble. He has also conducted Auros, Alea III, Dinosaur Annex, Fromm Chamber Players and the Brandeis Contemporary Players. In 2005, Mr. Hoose was awarded the 2005 Alice M. Ditson Conductors Award, given in recognition of his exceptional commitment to the performance of American Music, and whose list of past recipients includes Bernstein, Previn, Ormandy, and Stokowski. Maestro Hoose was recently awarded the 2008 Alfred Nash Patterson Lifetime Achievement Award from Choral Arts New England.
In his twenty-second year as director of orchestral activities at Boston University’s School of Music, Mr. Hoose has helped bring the orchestras to an unusually high level of distinction; at the school he has also mentored numbers of young conductors who now serve in a variety of distinguished professional conducting positions, from professional orchestras and opera companies, to college and youth orchestras, and to major US orchestras. For many summers, he has also worked with the Young Artists Orchestra of the Boston University Tanglewood Institute, has several times been a guest conductor at the New England Conservatory, and has conducted the orchestras of the Shepherd School at Rice University, University of Southern California, and the Eastman School. He recently served as a guest faculty member at the Rose City International Conducting Workshop, in Portland, Oregon.
As a horn player, Mr. Hoose was a founding member of the Emmanuel Wind Quintet, recipient of the Walter W. Naumburg Award for Chamber Music. From 1993 to 2005, he was Music Director of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra, conducting works ranging from Bach and Haydn to Mahler and Picker. During his tenure with the orchestra, the City of Tallahassee named a week after him in recognition of his contributions to the cultural life of the region.
He has conducted the Chicago Philharmonic, Singapore Symphony Orchestra, Saint Louis Symphony, Utah Symphony, Korean Broadcasting Symphony (KBS), Orchestra Regionale Toscana (Florence), 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 many times both with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and with Emmanuel Music.