Biography

Beverly Taylor is Director of Choral Activities and Associate Professor at the UW-Madison, where she conducts the Concert Choir, the 200-voice Choral Union, and directs the graduate choral conducting program. In 1999 the Concert Choir toured Britain and has been selected to perform at several American Choral Directors conventions. The Concert Choir has premiered two major works in the last few years—John Harbison’s Emerson for Double A Cappella Chorus and Thea Musgrave’s Celebration Day for chamber orchestra and chorus.

Recognized by Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer as a conductor who “has the crucial gift of inspiring people to give their best and beyond,” Beverly Taylor was Associate Director of Choral Activities at Harvard University for seventeen years before assuming her present post in 1995. While at Harvard, she directed both the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus and the international prize-winning Radcliffe Choral Society. She led the groups on frequent domestic and international tours, directed a number of premieres of American music and produced two recordings on the AFKA label. From 1989-96 she was music director of the Back Bay Chorale of Boston, which performed under her direction with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and other professional orchestras. Their recording of Robert Kyr’s Passion According to Four Evangelists is available on the New Albion label. As a guest conductor, Prof. Taylor has led the Artur Rubenstein Philharmonic Orchestra in Poland, the St. Louis Symphony Chorus, the Vermont Symphony, the Harvard Chamber Orchestra and Summer Chorus, the U.S. Air Force Band, the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and the Wellesley Chamber Singers, and—working with John Williams—the Boston Pops Esplanade Chorus. In Madison, Prof. Taylor also is Assistant Conductor of the Madison Symphony and Director of the Symphony Chorus.

A graduate of the University of Delaware and Boston University School for the Arts, Ms. Taylor has studied with Gustav Meier, Paul Vermel, Andrew Davis, Helmuth Rilling, Robert Shaw, Margaret Hillis and Herbert Blomstedt. She received an advanced conducting fellowship with Chorus America and an orchestral conducting fellowship at Aspen. Ms. Taylor is a frequent guest conductor and lecturer at festivals throughout the United States.

“Since writing the article for Image, I have continued a mixture of orchestral and choral conducting. With the Madison Symphony I conduct some subscription/pops concerts, family concerts, and classical concerts for youth and schools, which feature student concerto soloists as well as the regular symphony members playing our normal repertoire. As Assistant Conductor I also prepare the other concerts in case our music director is ill, but he remains quite healthy! I continue to learn new repertoire with an aim toward more guest conducting ofother orchestras.”

“At the University of Wisconsin-Madison I am in the middle of my sixth academic year as Director of Choral Activities. It’s been a marvelous few years of having the opportunity to perform some profound masterpieces, including the Britten War Requiem, Verdi’s Requiem, Kyr’sPassion According to Four Evangelists, and Bach’s B Minor Mass. This spring I look forward to conducting the StravinskySymphonie of Psalms and Haydn Harmoniemesse. With the Concert Choir, our touring choir, we went abroad to England a year ago, and will be touring the U.S., appearing in Philadelphia, Delaware, Washington, Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee in mid-March. Our current repertoire contains motets old and new, major works such as the Hamer On Paper Bridges or Ginastera Lamentations of Jeremiah, plus some lighter folksongs and shorter works and some of the Brahms Liebeslieder Walzes. The Concert Choir last year premiered a work for chorus and chamber orchestra by Thea Musgrave—Celebration Day, and this year performed the difficult and stunning On Paper Bridges. This piece, by Janice Hamer, is a reworking of a Yiddish folk legend about the people of God returning to the holy land on paper bridges (“why paper? because that is all they had”), while the wicked, attempting to cross on bridges of iron, did not survive. These texts were prepared by Mary Azrael, also a poet, and another poem by Massachusetts poet Marrtha Collins, drawn from holocaust experiences, was added to the libretto. The music incorporates some Yiddish folktunes into its complex, dramatic and hopeful three-movement a cappella structure.”

“Last January I also was privileged to conduct a children’s opera, Brundibar, which has been performed by several other groups around the country. The work was originally performed by children in the Terezin concentration camp as a showcase for the Red Cross and others. One of the survivors, Ella Weissberger, worked with our cast of children and also spoke about her experiences to the audience before every performance. As one of only a tiny group of the cast who did not die in the camps, she feels that she owes it to her comrades to tell their story around the world. In the very simple plot, some poor children, trying to sing to earn money for their sick mother, are shooed away by a mean organ-grinder (whom the children in the production equated with Hitler), but who succeed in winning the hearts of the crowd and ridding them, at least temporarily, of the evil “Brundibar.”

“One new interest for me this year is composing. Having worked closely with many composers on their premieres, I have tried writing myself. So far I’ve produced some settings of poems by Heather Dubrow and May Sarton, and am working on a song cycle for mezzo or baritone. I’ve received a grant for part of the summer, so I’ll hope to orchestrate some of these songs then.”