Isabelle Provost

The Clarion Choir

The Clarion Choir was formed in 2006 and made their Lincoln Center debut in 2011, performing Bach Chorales as part of the White Light Festival. The Choir has a focus on Baroque and Classical repertoire. But over the last decade, they have also expanded into later literature, developing a particular speciality in the choral music of Rachmaninoff and his contemporaries. In 2014, the choir gave the New York premiere of a lost Russian masterwork from the 1920s, Passion Week by Maximilian Steinberg. In October of 2016, Clarion premiered the work in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and London. Their performances were featured on PBS, and their recording of the work, the Choir's debut recording, received nominations for a GRAMMY® and for BBC Music Magazine's Choral Award. The Choir has since performed and recorded other works from this period, such as Kastalsky's Memory Eternal, which debuted at #1 on the Billboard Classical charts, and Kastalsky's Requiem, which received 'Editor's Choice' in Gramophone. In 2023, the Choir performed and recorded Rachmaninoff's large-scale sacred choral works in celebration of the composer's 150th birthday, a project that was featured in the New York Times and BBC Music Magazine. The Choir sang Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St. John at New Year in 2023 and the All-Night Vigil ('Vespers') at Carnegie Hall in May of 2023. Their recently-released recording of the Vespers was nominated for a GRAMMY® for Best Choral Performance.

In 2019 and 2023, the Choir joined The English Concert and Harry Bicket for their annual Handel tour, performing Handel’s Semele and Solomon, respectively, in the Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, the Barbican Centre in London, Cal Performances in Berkeley, Théatre des Champs Elysée in Paris, LA Opera and Carnegie Hall. The Clarion Choir has also performed regularly in recent years as part of the Live Arts series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art;. They have presented large-scale Renaissance works by Victoria, Palestrina, Tavener, Josquin, Ockeghem and Guerrero in the Medieval Sculpture Hall and the Met Cloisters.

The Choir has collaborated with other notable artists and ensembles such as Leonard Slatkin, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, The Knights, Susan Graham, Anthony Roth Costanzo, Isabel Leonard, Angel Blue and Madonna at the 2018 Met Gala.

The Clarion Orchestra

The Clarion Orchestra was founded in 1957 by conductor and musicologist Newell Jenkins. Beginning on modern instruments, then switching to period instruments in the 1970s, Clarion became one of the first period ensembles with a concert series in the United States. Shortly after Jenkins’ tenure, the series had a nearly ten-year hiatus until its revival in 2006 by the Clarion Board of Directors and Steven Fox. Many of the ensemble members are acclaimed as solo and chamber musicians and serve on faculties of the Juilliard School, Mannes School of Music, Bard College, SUNY Purchase, and Yale School of Music; other members of the Orchestra are recent graduates of those programs. The Orchestra has played at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Morgan Library, and The Frick Collection in repertoire that has ranged from the late Renaissance to the early Romantic. In 2009, The Clarion Orchestra was featured in Jonathan Miller’s fully-staged production of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at BAM. And in the spring of 2017, the Orchestra, in collaboration with Christodora, produced its first-ever staged opera production, Mozart’s Magic Flute. The performances received critical acclaim in The New York Times, Opera News, The New York Concert Review and London’s Opera magazine, which remarked that “the generously sized period orchestra played superbly.” In recent years, the Orchestra has been a recipient of three Art Works grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Vincent Soyez

Steven Fox

Steven Fox is Artistic Director of The Clarion Choir & The Clarion Orchestra. He is also the Music Director of Cathedral Choral Society, the symphonic chorus in residence at Washington National Cathedral, and a Cover Conductor to Jaap van Zweden at the New York Philharmonic. He has appeared as a guest conductor with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Handel and Haydn Society, Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Opéra de Québec, Charleston Symphony Orchestra, Julliard415, and Theatre of Early Music (Toronto).

In 2023, Steven embarked on a project to perform all of Rachmaninoff's choral works in celebration of the composer's 150th anniversary. The project, which was featured in The New York Times and BBC Music Magazine, will reach its conclusion on October 30th with a performance of Rachmaninoff's rarely-heard cantata Vesna and Three Folk Songs. He has made four recordings with The Clarion Choir of music by Steinberg, Kastalsky and Rachmaninoff, a series which has received Gramophone's Editor's Choice, a nomination for the BBC Choral Award, and four GRAMMY® nominations for Best Choral Performance.

Steven was named an Associate (ARAM) of the Royal Academy of Music and has given master classes at The Royal Academy of Music, his alma mater Dartmouth College, The Juilliard School, and Yale University, where he served for two years as a preparatory conductor of the Yale Schola Cantorum.

 

Fadi Kheir