50 Years and Counting: City Choir Director's Musical Anniversary

In celebrating his 50th anniversary as a choir director, Robert Shafer has chosen a magnificent work composed by Anton Bruckner exactly 150 years ago for the next City Choir of Washington concert. And it is also the 50th anniversary of the Washington area premiere of this rarely performed piece, the Mass in F Minor.

The program will also include Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and several Bruckner motets at National Presbyterian Church in Washington at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 5.

Shafer attributes the sublime beauty and spiritual depth of the Mass in F Minor to the composer’s recovery from a serious mental illness.

“Bruckner was rather eccentric and waged a life-long battle with obsessive compulsive disorder,” Shafer says. “In the early part of 1867, he spent three months in the sanatorium in Bad Kreuzen. Following his recovery, he began his greatest symphonic choral work, the Mass in F Minor.”

For Shafer, this season represents a milestone of 50 years, starting with his direction of the Madison High School chorus in Vienna, Va., at age 22. Now he is considered the last of the city’s choral “old guard,” having recently lost his dear friends Norman Scribner and J. Reilly Lewis.

Shafer’s 35 years of work with the Washington Chorus was superb in every way. He has been involved in over 300 concerts which he conducted or helped prepare for the Kennedy Center, many with the National Symphony Orchestra. During his tenure with the chorus, he toured throughout Europe six times. In 2000, Shafer won a Grammy Award of “Best Choral Performance” for his recording of the Britten War Requiem, which is considered the greatest work for chorus and orchestra of the 20th century.

Since 2007, Shafer has focused his efforts in developing the City Choir of Washington. The chorus has had many successes and has sung at the Kennedy Center, Strathmore, Wolf Trap and the Lincoln Center in New York. In 2013, City Choir premiered the last major work for choir and orchestra of Sir John Tavener at Washington National Cathedral. The choir presents a series of three concerts each year at the National Presbyterian Church. In the summer of 2018, it plans its first European tour to Great Britain.

Over his 50-year career in Washington, Shafer has served in many distinguished positions. He was the music director of St. Matthew’s Cathedral and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception between 1974 and 1983. He was professor of music and director of choral activities at the Conservatory of Shenandoah University between 1983 and 2016 and now serves as professor emeritus.

Looking back on his 50 years as a conductor in Washington, Shafer reflected, "I am so grateful for every opportunity that I have had in symphonic and chamber choral music, every student I have taught, and every note of church music that I have played and conducted. Even at a couple of unsure crossroads along the way, God has always led me to something better. I couldn't be happier."

Shafer’s anniversary year repertoire also includes “The Holly and the Ivy: Music for Christmas” concert on Dec. 17 and will conclude on April 22, 2018, with Handel’s Laudate pueri Dominumum, Te Deum by Marc Antoine Charpentier and the world premiere of Magnificat by the young American composer, Brian Bartoldus.