A2 THURSDAY, DECEMBER 25, 2014 FROM THE FRONT PAGE LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER | KENTUCKY.COM

It was a Kentucky connec-tion that brought him to this return, as the newly appoint-ed artistic director of the Na-tional Chorale, the only pro-fessional choral organization to establish and maintain an annual choral-orchestra series in a major New York City concert hall.

In July, the Chorale suf-fered a devastating blow with the sudden death of its only artistic director, Martin Jos-man, who founded the group in 1967.

Active UK alumna Myra Leigh Tobin has been a mem-ber of the Chorale board for years, chairing it at least three times. She said of Jos-man: “He was the lifeblood of this group.”

McCorvey, 57, first en-countered Josman when he auditioned for the Chorale as a young singer.

“He was a taskmaster,” McCorvey recalls over lunch at Benash Delicatessen, a few blocks from the National Chorale offices in Midtown Manhattan. “He had a real eye for quality in the vocal sound and what he wanted to accomplish musically. He demanded excellence. I got along with him well. That’s because I came to rehearsals prepared.”

McCorvey says working with Josman and the Nation-al Chorale gave him a frame-work for his own approach to music education.

“It was my experience with the National Chorale that helped me understand what the requirements are for professional musicians, which are you have to be a crackerjack sight-reader, you have to be able to learn music quickly, get it up to a performance level, and per-form it as if you’ve been per-forming it for six months,” McCorvey says. “The people who can’t do that will have trouble being successful in the business, because they won’t get rehired.

“The conductor expects them to come in knowing the part, because it’s not just learning notes, it’s making music.”

Over the years, Tobin kept McCorvey posted about Josman and the Chorale, and after Josman died, she asked for his advice about a suc-cessor. But soon, she set her eye on her own home state favorite.

“I dreamed a dream,” Tobin says of pitching Mc-Corvey to the Chorale board. “I guess I made a good sales pitch.”

Not everyone bought in initially.

“There were some nay-sayers who said, ‘What does

a Kentucky director know about New York City? New York will eat him alive,’” board chair Judith E. Rinear-son says. “Then he came in and blew all that away.”

At this critical point in the group’s history, Rinearson says, “Not only did we need a consummate musician, we needed a people person.”

And that was the mode McCorvey was in while find-ing his way to the Avery Fisher stage door to prepare

for the 47th annual Messiah Sing-In, an audience sing-along of George Frideric Handel’s Messiah featuring 16 conductors, each leading one of the oratorio’s chorus-es.

They included numerous New York-based choral con-ductors and a few from out-side the area. Among them was Hugh Ferguson Floyd, director of choral activities at South Carolina’s Furman University, whom McCor-vey invited specifically for his role as artistic director of the New York State Sum-mer School for the Arts. The

National Chorale has several education initiatives in New York City public schools, in-cluding a major partnership with the Professional Per-forming Arts High School for children who are professional performers.

In his dressing room, dec-orated with New York Phil-harmonic programs that fea-tured legendary figures such as Gustav Mahler, McCorvey contemplates whether to put on his white tie and tails

before or after making the rounds to greet the conduc-tors and soloists.

“I’d better do it before I go out or I might get to talk-ing and run out of time,” Mc-Corvey says.

That is very easy to imag-ine, as his wife, Alicia, and others talk during this quick trip to New York about Mc-Corvey’s legendary gift for gab. Later in the evening, UK Opera stage manager Marc Schlackman goes to retrieve a chatty McCorvey from a post-concert party so he can have dinner, well after midnight.

Backstage, McCorvey is making the rounds talk-ing to conductors, many of whom knew Josman and the Chorale well and have a keen interest in the organization’s future.

Late into a group briefing, where McCorvey introduces himself and gets some point-ers from conductors with years of Sing-In experience, conductor Gregory Hopkins rises at the back and, on behalf of all the conductors,

welcomes McCorvey saying, “We are excited to see what music you bring to New York.”

The National Chorale post is in addition to his work at UK. McCorvey — who is legendary for sending emails with time stamps from the wee hours — jokes that the Chorale “will fill my 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. time slot.”

McCorvey notes that for faculty at performing arts schools, perform or perish is their “publish or perish,” and the Chorale helps fulfill that requirement. And with the Chorale’s involvement in New York schools, McCor-vey, who recruits just like UK basketball coach John Cali-pari, can see the potential of attracting talented students to Kentucky.

The job will involve regu-lar shuttling to New York for which he hopes Alicia will join him as they soon will be empty nesters.

While plenty of the mem-bers of the Chorale, an au-ditioned group, were in the Sing-In crowd, their first per-formance under McCorvey’s direction will be in February, following several days of re-

hearsal for a show that will be a joint appearance with McCorvey’s American Spiri-tual Ensemble.

As much as the Chorale years ago prepared Mc-Corvey for a professional music career, he says lead-ing the American Spiritual Ensemble, which focuses on the preservation and perfor-mance of spiritual music, prepared him to lead the Chorale.

An early afternoon meet-ing with Chorale director of operations Amy Siegler is a flurry of plans and details, both for the concert at hand and the season to come. A lot of discussion focuses on generating new audiences and donors for the group, which, says everyone in-volved, seemed like it could have folded after Josman’s death.

“I’d like to find ways for the organization to raise more money, create some endowments, maybe cre-ate some fiscal foundations knowing there’s money to present the season,” Mc-Corvey says, then laughs, adding, “It feels like talking about UK Opera. It’s sort of the same. The arts are al-ways dicey.”

He also has ambitions to raise the profile of the Cho-rale, looking at the New York calendar for spots where it might be able to present events that would put it in the mix of New York culture, like the annual Alltech Cele-bration of Song in downtown Lexington, which McCorvey conducted the night before his Chorale debut. Alltech

founder and president Pearse Lyons flew McCorvey to New York and was one of several Kentucky notables in the Sing-In audience, which also included Gov. Steve Beshear and his wife, Jane; and Lex-ington Mayor Jim Gray, who was in New York for a confer-ence.

“He’s a rock star,” Gray said of McCorvey. “He’s a great ambassador for Lexing-ton.”

Chorale board chair Rinearson marveled, “We’ve never had a governor at one of our performances.”

McCorvey’s onstage de-meanor would be familiar to anyone who has attended a UK Opera performance or one of UK Opera’s Grand Night for Singing shows.

He engaged the audience in a show of hands to see how many people had been to two, five, 10 and so-on performances, identifying one audience member who had been to all 47. And he led vocal warmups, just as he would for his singers at UK.

“Dad would have been very happy with how he did it tonight,” Josman’s daugh-ter, Cathy Josman said, not-ing her family has roots in Covington and Mount Ster-ling. “He had an energy and enthusiasm that made me ex-cited for the future.”

As any artist knows, there’s a lot to be said for getting a good review from a tough critic in New York City.

Rich Copley: (859) 231-3217. Email: rcopley@herald-leader.com. Twitter: @LexGoKY.

From Page A1

MCCORVEY

During his trip to New York this month for his first appearance as artistic director of the National Chorale, Everett McCorvey discussed plans with Amy Siegler, the group’s director of operations.

PHOTOS BY RICH COPLEY | rcopley@herald-leader.com

At the National Chorale, McCorvey succeeds Martin Josman, who founded the group in 1967. Josman died in July.

During the Messiah Sing-In, McCorvey led the New York audience in singing And the Glory of the Lord.

“There were some naysayers who said, ‘What does a Kentucky director know about New York City? New York will eat him alive.’ Then he came in and blew all that away.”

Judith Rinearson, National Chorale board chair, speaking of Everett McCorvey

allow U.S. exports to Cuba’s small class of private business owners, which includes thou-sands of mechanics and taxi drivers who shuttle Cubans in battered sedans for about 50 cents a ride and tourists in shiny, restored vintage ve-hicles for $25 an hour.

While the details of Obama’s reforms remain un-certain, Cubans are hopeful that their publication in the coming weeks will end a five-decade drought of cars and parts.

“Maybe it will be possible to get parts faster, at better prices,” a hopeful Raul Arabi, 58, said while seated behind the wheel of a cherry-red 1952 Chevy convertible that still runs on its original 6-cyl-inder engine. “If they opened a specific store for this, even better.”

Cuba long restricted car ownership almost entirely to prominent bureaucrats, high achievers in their fields and professionals who completed government service abroad.

That limit was dropped

last year, but it was replaced by markups that drove prices as high as $262,000 for a Peu-geot that lists for the equiva-lent of about $53,000 outside Cuba. That leaves classic cars as one of the only options for Cubans needing private transportation for themselves or a business, although prices of about $20,000 for old cars mean buyers on the island often need help for the pur-chase from relatives abroad.

With so much invested in their cars, new engines, hoods, fenders and transmis-sions are a dream for the owners of what once were known as “Humphrey Boga-rts” and that remain a fixture of the landscape.

“It’s pretty complicated,” said Tio, 27. “The govern-ment won’t sell you glass for these old cars. They won’t sell replacement parts for these old cars. Everything is made by hand.”

A few years ago, the only way Tio could get new tires for his car was to rely on the generosity of a relative who brought some back from Ven-ezuela.

In the meantime, necessi-ty will drive invention when

it comes to maintaining the thousands of classic cars that fill Cuba’s cities and country-side. Many are used for daily needs and commutes; others transport curious tourists soaking up nostalgia, new-lyweds, or girls celebrating their quinceañeras — tradi-tional 15th-birthday celebra-tions.

“When the materia l doesn’t exist, one has to in-vent it,” said a mechanic who agreed to reveal some of his secrets on the condition that he not be identified because he feared possible repercus-sions.

Suspension systems are

among the most complicated to repair, simply because there are no parts available. But he noted that trains have similar springs that support a lot of weight.

Train coil springs are small-er than those of the cars, but the mechanic described how they could be stretched with a manual press until they are the necessary height.

“We fix everything, all the time,” he said proudly.

Such haphazard methods are not ideal in terms of safety: Putting powerful en-gines in cars with old body-work and no seat belts or airbags increases the risk of

dangerous accidents.And while Cubans’ in-

genuity at keeping the cars running is impressive, the fact that they have patched together the old cars with scraps means the cars have little chance of becoming col-lectors’ items in the United States once the market be-tween the two countries opens up.

“I’m not sure there’s a sin-gle car on the road in Cuba you could bring here and put in a car show,” said Tom Wilkinson, a classic car lover from Detroit who recently visited the island as part of a cultural exchange.

“You have to admire how resourceful the Cubans have been, keeping these cars run-ning and modernizing them as much as they can,” Wilkin-son said. “That said, by the standards of the American collector, they’re way too rough.”

That’s probably OK with Cuba, where such cars are like old friends that would not be easy to part with.

“This is part of the na-tional culture,” said Arabi, who parks his red Chevy convertible on Havana’s icon-ic seafront boulevard, the Malecón, waiting for tourists to pay for a ride.

“It is part of the culture that tourists want to see here ... and it is part of our own culture. ... Cubans want to celebrate their weddings, their 15-year-old birthday celebrations, in these cars,” he said.

With that, Arabi ended the conversation with a rev of his engine as a couple climbed in for a spin in his classic auto — a timeless ride that, somehow, despite years of use and against engineering odds, keeps on running, day after day.

From Page A1

CARS

For their quinceañeras last week, two Cuban girls sat on the back of a vintage convertible during a ride along the iconic Malecón, the waterfront boulevard in Havana.

DESMOND BOYLAN | ASSOCIATED PRESS