Featured Composer

The Berkshire Choral Festival has commissioned a work from American composer, arranger and conductor Donald McCullough, which will have its World Premiere on July 21, 2007 at the Choral Festival. And you can be part of it!

In his newest sacred works, including the commission, a setting of Psalm 150, Don McCullough gives familiar psalms and ancient sacred texts a fresh American voice imbued with infectious rhythmic energy and vivid melodic and harmonic colors. This is beautifully lyric music and a joy to sing. Click on the play button to the left of the work to listen to four of the works to be sung.

We Remember Them
Lift Up Your Heads
Prayer of St. Richard of Chichester
O Be Joyful in the Lord

The Haydn – Harmoniemesse will make up the other part of our program.

Biography

Donald McCullough is in his ninth season as music director of The Master Chorale of Washington, a rigorously auditioned choir comprised of both volunteer and professional singers that has been presenting choral concerts in Washington, DC for the past 38 years and a concert series in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall since the Kennedy Center opened its doors in 1971.

During Mr. McCullough's tenure, the Master Chorale has performed ten world premieres, produced three nationally distributed CD's, and received several prestigious honors and awards, including the Chorale's recent selection from over 250 international auditionees to be a featured chorus at the American Choral Directors Association's 2003 National Convention in New York City performing in Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center's Avery Fisher Hall, and historic Riverside Church.
Master Chorale of Washington was invited by a committee of German consular officials preparing for Germany's commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII to be a featured guest artist performing Mr. McCullough's deeply affecting work, Holocaust Cantata, in such renowned venues as Berliner Dom, the Berlin Holocaust Museum, and Dresden's Frauenkirche during Germany's 2005 American Celebration of Music.

Regularly appearing as a guest conductor and clinician, Mr. McCullough performed as a featured conductor in the 2004 Berkshire Choral Festival, led the Louisiana Philharmonic in Handel's Messiah in December 2003 and the Florida ACDA Honor's Choir in his own Canite Tuba: A Christmas Triptych in October 2003, and served as a guest clinician for the United Methodists' Music and Liturgical Arts Week in July 2004.
Donald McCullough has composed three extended works that have all realized Kennedy Center premieres. Upon its premiere in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theatre in 1998, his Holocaust Cantata, a work that immortalized tunes written by prisoners in concentration camps, was later featured in The New York Times, The Washington Times and on CNN.

In December 2001, Mr. McCullough's Canite Tuba: A Christmas Triptych premiered in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall and his Let My People Go, a concert theatre work in which he arranged spirituals containing Underground Railroad freedom codes and combined them with dramatic readings interwoven throughout, premiered in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall in May of 2003.
Donald McCullough holds bachelor's degrees in both organ and vocal performance from Stetson University and master's degrees in both sacred music and vocal performance from Southern Methodist University. He came to Washington, DC in 1996 from Norfolk, Virginia, where he had founded two organizations that continue to thrive today—the Virginia Symphony Chorus and the Virginia Chorale, which continues to be the state's only fully professional choral ensemble.