Portland’s choral music scene is flourishing

The past few years have seen a changing of the guard in Portland’s choral music scene. Last year, the city’s two most influential veteran choral conductors, University of Portland professor Roger Doyle and Lewis & Clark College’s Gil Seeley, retired after three-plus decades of leading two of the city’s three most important choral organizations: Choral Arts Ensemble and Oregon Repertory Singers (ORS).  The conductor of the third, Portland Symphonic Choir’s Bruce Browne, had left Portland for a teaching job in Oklahoma a few years earlier, after building Portland State University’s program to national prominence and founding the superb Choral Cross Ties ensemble, which folded after he left.

While the city’s choral scene still flourished during the 2000s (including the founding of strong new ensembles run by Browne’s former students Ryan Heller, David York and Alexander Lingas), some slippage was evident in several corners of the city’s choral establishment, and choral music lovers could have been forgiven for worrying about what would happen in the wake of the departures of these strong leaders.

No more. The recent arrival of two energetic, imaginative young successors to the Big Three have revitalized the programs at PSU and L&C, and the two conductors — Ethan Sperry (whom I profiled last month in Willamette Week) and Katherine FitzGibbon, who directs choral programs at Lewis & Clark, are also running, respectively, Oregon Rep Singers and the recently arrived Resonance Ensemble, which has already established itself as one of the Northwest’s finest vocal groups.

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