Yale Schola Cantorum

Masaaki Suzuki, conductor
Visting Professor of choral conducting
Yale Institute of Sacred Music and Yale School of Music

Masaaki Suzuki appointed as new director of Yale Schola Cantorum | learn more

Yale Schola Cantorum recording of St. John Passion (1725 version) featured in Early Music Review article | learn more

Yale Schola Cantorum featured in
Choir & Organ Magazine article | learn more

Schola, ISM conducting students honored | learn more

Yale Schola Cantorum,

Yale Schola Cantorum, founded in 2003 by Simon Carrington, is a 24-voice chamber choir that sings in concerts and choral services. Supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music with the School of Music, and open by audition to all Yale students, it specializes in music from before 1750 and the last hundred years. Since 2009 Schola Cantorum has been under the direction of conductor Masaaki Suzuki.

In addition to performing regularly in New Haven and New York, the choir records and tours nationally and internationally. Schola Cantorum’s live recording with Robert Mealy and Yale Collegium Musicum of Heinrich Biber’s 1693 Vesperae longiores ac breviores received international acclaim from the early music press, as have subsequent CDs of J.S. Bach’s rarely heard 1725 version of the St. John Passion and Antonio Bertali's Missa resurrectionis. A commercial recording on the Naxos label of Mendelssohn and Bach Magnificats was released in fall 2009. Schola Cantorum has toured internationally in England, Hungary, France, China, and South Korea, and will travel to Italy in May of 2011.

This season Masaaki Suzuki will conduct performances of the Monteverdi 1610 Vespers and the Bach St. Matthew Passion with Juilliard415 in New Haven and New York and Italy. In recent years, the choir has sung under the direction of internationally renowned conductors Helmuth Rilling, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sir Neville Marriner, Stephen Layton, Paul Hillier, Nicholas McGegan, and Dale Warland. Guest conductors in 2010-11 are Andrew Megill, James O’Donnell, Simon Halsey, and Simon Carrington. Other repertoire to date includes works by Josquin, Manchicourt, Lassus, Willaert, Tallis, Byrd, Guerrero, Gibbons, Taverner, Schütz, Charpentier, Purcell, Handel, Zelenka, Brahms, Bruckner, Poulenc, Stravinsky, Dallapiccola, Britten, Tippett, Feldman, Rautavaara, Gubaidulina, Berio, Bennett, Stucky, MacMillan, O’Regan, and Yale faculty members Ezra Laderman, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ingram Marshall, and Joan Panetti.

(Updated December 2010)