Bel Canto Chorus

The Bel Canto Chorus has had its ups and downs over 80 years of singing.

The group once had well over 200 singers and was the official chorus of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. It often toured Europe and had great prestige in its home town. But the chorus fell on hard times artistically in the late 1970s. Singers aged out of good voice but didn’t leave the chorus. The MSO dropped them for the late Margaret Hawkins’ Wisconsin Conservatory choir, which evolved into the present Milwaukee Symphony Chorus. A fiscal crisis almost ended the institution in the early 1980s. Even with that storm weathered, the BCC was left with no real mission beyond giving people who like to sing a chance to do it for an audience of mostly family and friends.

That was the state of things in 1988, when Richard Hynson arrived, fresh out of the Cincinnati Conservatory, to become the BCC’s music director.

“It took 10 years to get to zero, so we could begin to build,” Hynson said. A decade of painful annual auditions and re-auditions gradually weeded the ranks. Programs in vocal training and music-reading skills improved the voices that remained and set a higher standard for newcomers.

“Our mean age has dropped from about 60 to about 40,” Hynson said. “And the younger singers have brought new skill sets with them.”

The head count has dropped from 200-plus to 90, including 10 paid professionals who work as section leaders. Hynson saw all this as addition by subtraction, but he would like to get back to 100 singers. That’s a goal for the next season or two. Hynson thinks that a move in rehearsal venue, from the Wilson Center in western Brookfield to the Milwaukee Youth Arts Center downtown, will help attract and keep singers.

Hynson has tried a number of strategies to expand his audience and raise the group’s profile in Milwaukee, including an ill-fated attempt to create an elite small choir as a subset of Bel Canto. About 1o years ago, he  tried repeating Milwaukee programs at far-flung venues, including Sheboygan, Madison and northern Illinois, in an attempt to become a regional institution. He’s had better results more recently, with the start-up of the  21-voice Bel Canto Boy Choir and by forging relationships with other musical institutions. In May, the BCC organized a concert in Oconomowoc that involved the Milwaukee Choristers, the Waukesha Choral Union and the MSO in Verdi’s Requiem. It sold out the venue and created other opportunities.

“We want to break down some of the barriers that have always existed among the groups,” Hynson said. “We’re always afraid they’ll take our singers or audience. But we have to get over that mom-and-pop mentality. The Bel Canto is well situated to help with that.”

“The Oconomowoc concert built our mailing list from 500 to over 1,000,” said Marla Hahn, the BCC’s new managing director. Hahn moved to Milwaukee in April to take the job. Hahn had been marketing and sales manager at the Overture Center in Madison. She has an MBA with a specialty in non-profits from UW-Madison.

Hahn appears to be a very good hire for an organization with a modest budget of $380,000. The board has also expanded from five to 14 (including Hynson and Hahn), to beef up fund-raising and oversight.

The volunteer singers pay $125 per year to participate. That and merchandise sales came to about $9,000 last year. The BCC’s UPAF allocation was about $50,000. Concert sponsors kicked in $50,000 and foundations $30,000. The annual gala and campaign brought in nearly $70,000. Educational activities earned about $10,000. Gifts and grants from board members, singers and individuals covered most of the rest. (The BCC currently has $15,000 on its line of credit, which is used to stabilize cash-flow throughout the year. — update 1:09 p.m. Tuesday.)

The BCC did earn $49,000 at the box office last season, up from $28,000 the season before. Total attendance was 3,264.

“We sold out four or five concerts,” Hysnon said. “The numbers are way beyond family and friends.”

The group’s new policy is to involve at least one other institution in each program. That works neatly with Hynson’s idea of focusing each concert on some theme that a potential audience can grasp.

He managed to find a theme for the whole 2010-11 season: Next year marks the sesquicentennial of the start of the Civil War. A lot of music came out of it or relates to it. The Kenosha Civil War Museum, which opened in 2008, is the natural partner and will present at three of the BCC’s four concerts next season. (The Civil War and Christmas don’t mix.)

The season will include Songs of the Slaves, which Kirke Mechem drew from his opera, John Brown. (Skylight Opera Theatre fans might recall Mechem’s excellent Tartuffe, staged here in January of 2007.) Appalachian folk songs, Joseph Baber’s An American Requiem and Carol Barnett’s Bluegrass Mass are also on the bill. For further information and to order tickets, click here or call 414 481-8801.