FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
The William Baker Choral Foundation Center announces the appointment of Dr. Matthew Recio as Artistic Director of Vox Venti, the organization’s Chicago-based semi-professional chorus that specializes in championing new music. Recio will succeed founding Artistic Director Ed Frazier Davis, who has guided the 32-voice ensemble to become one of the most consequential choral enterprises in the Chicago region. Davis will remain with Vox Venti as Executive Director, serving managerial needs of the organization and working collaboratively with Dr. Recio and the Choral Foundation headquarters in strategic planning.
Vox Venti was created as a new ensemble of the Choral Foundation in 2022 with singers from throughout the Chicagoland area. The ensemble is dedicated to the synthesis and performance of unique, diverse, and emotionally powerful choral repertoire. Though Vox Venti has performed works from all periods of music history, the choir has demonstrated a special affinity for works by living composers, especially composers from under-represented populations. Vox Venti has performed 19 world premieres in its first four seasons, with two more scheduled for 2026-2027.
Dr. William O. Baker, head of the Choral Foundation welcomes Dr. Recio to the organization’s faculty: “Matthew Recio has demonstrated a remarkable capacity for connecting singers and audiences together with a spirit of artistic adventure and joy. His insights and interpretive depth were exciting for the ensemble to experience when he appeared with Vox Venti as a guest conductor in early 2026. I am delighted that Ed Frazier Davis will remain in a primary leadership capacity with Vox Venti, working collaboratively with Dr. Recio and our entire artistic team.”
Vox Venti Founder Ed Frazier Davis is delighted for the new era of the ensemble he created in 2022: “I’m absolutely thrilled to pass the reins of Vox Venti’s artistic leadership to Matthew. He is an excellent and extremely well-rounded musician—a quadruple threat, being a conductor, composer, pianist, and tenor!—and an overall incredibly sweet and thoughtful guy to boot. I’m incredibly optimistic about where he’ll be able to take the ensemble in the years to come, and I know he’ll do a great job of continuing my work with the group—to steward not only an ensemble that offers high quality performances of ambitious, diverse music, but also a welcoming space where musicians of all persuasions can leave what vexes them at the door and relish in each other’s camaraderie.”
About Dr. Matthew Recio
An avid vocal composer, Dr. Matthew Recio collaborates with poets, writers, and artists across the globe to bring text to life in the concert hall and on the theatrical stage. He was the 2019-2021 Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer with Chicago Opera Theatre, where he wrote his one-act opera The Puppy Episode with esteemed librettist Royce Vavrek, winning him the American Prize Award in Opera Composition. Passionate about raising marginalized voices, he was proud to have been a resident composer with the LYNX Project’s Amplify Series, where he collaborated with poet John-Carlos Schaut to lift nonverbal autistic voices in the art song sphere, and he has also collaborated with Queer In(n) to create a vocal work, featuring an adaptive libretto by Dr. Marquese Carter, inspired by the life of trans activist and Chicago icon Mama Gloria, who passed shortly after the work’s premiere. Other song projects include his work for Fourth Coast Ensemble’s WordSong commissioning series, an ensemble where he was also a featured winner of the Chicago SongSlam series for How We Hush. Matthew had his Ravinia debut with his commissioned work, Might be Equal, for tenor Ryan Townsend Strand’s acclaimed album “Letters to Jackie.” He has collaborated with Chicago-based choir Stare at the Sun on multiple projects, most notably an immersive choral cantata, The Hollow, that explores themes of isolation, depression, emergence, and renewal, with libretti by Alejandra Villareal Martínez. With equal passion for instrumental composition, he has been represented at the Midwest Composer Symposium, the UNK Music Festival, and the Hammer and Nail Dance collaboration. His chamber works received recognition at the IMTA young artist composition competition and the Quartet Nouveau competition. He is a published artist under the Dale Warland Series through G. Schirmer/Hal Leonard.
A summa cum laude graduate and Charles F. Hockett Scholarship recipient of Ithaca College (B.M., composition), Matthew completed his D.M.A. in composition, with a minor concentration in choral conducting, at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where he was also a Jacobs fellowship recipient and associate instructor in aural skills. His principal teachers included Dana Wilson, Claude Baker, Aaron Travers, Don Freund, David Dzubay, Eric Ewazen, P.Q. Phan, and Sven-David Sandström.
Matthew is on faculty in the musical studies department at the DePaul University School of Music.
Vox Venti is one of 15 musical ensembles of the Kansas City-based William Baker Choral Foundation, in addition to the Jane Sullivan Choral Resource Library, the Institute for Healthy Singing and Voice Research, the Choral Director’s Toolbox Podcast, and numerous other programs active in Illinois, Iowa, Georgia, Kansas, and Missouri. ChoralFoundation.org
VoxVenti.org
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