Malcolm Halliday's journey from Master Singers of Worcester to Chorale San Miguel in Mexico

In a fairly short period of time, Malcolm Halliday went from being artistic director of the Master Singers of Worcester to founder and artistic director of the choral society Chorale San Miguel.

That's San Miguel de Allende, a UNESCO World Heritage Site city at an elevation of over 6,000 feet in the state of Guanajuato, Mexico.

Halliday moved there from Worcester with his partner in 2017 after a long and fruitful association with the cultural scene here. Worcester has a rich choral tradition, and now San Miguel de Allende is likely to see its choral music scene enhanced with Halliday in the picture.

In 2019, the newly formed Chorale San Miguel put on a performance of Mozart's Requiem Mass in November and two performances of Handel's Messiah Dec. 21 and 22 with a 55-voice choir, orchestra and young Mexican soloists. The concerts sold out.

The performances "seemed to ignite something in town. We don't have the seating capacity of Mechanics Hall, but between the two programs we had close to 700 people," Halliday said.

Then the plans for the rest of the season, and the following season, had to be canceled because of the pandemic.

It doesn't really seem like five years have passed since Halliday left Worcester for San Miguel de Allende. "The pandemic seems to have shortened time," Halliday noted.

But 2022 finds both Halliday and Chorale San Miguel doing well and looking to the future. And Halliday has stayed in touch with Central Massachusetts, periodically returning, as he has this summer.

Halliday and his partner have maintained a lake home in Ashburnham, and Halliday has been giving a few recitals in the area recently, including a performance at Southgate at Shrewsbury. He's also been guest organist and pianist this summer at First Congregational Church of Princeton, albeit that the organ is out of commission.

August trip to Mexico

In August, he'll be flying back to Mexico for a week to play three concerts before returning to see out the summer here.

Meanwhile, he's working on bringing a Johnson & Sons pipe organ that dates from around 1875 from Williamstown, Massachusetts, to San Miguel de Allende.

Halliday is originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and came to New England to earn his master's degree in piano performance at Boston University. He was artistic director of the Master Singers of Worcester from 1998 to 2017 (The Master Singers of Worcester were founded in 1976 and are now led by Edward Tyler), as well as longtime minister of music at First Congregational Church of Shrewsbury and also pianist, organist and teacher.

He was known for the originality and creativity of his programing, and although he "retired" when he moved to Mexico, he soon became active on the cultural scene there.

"I'm feeling great. I do not feel too much the worse for wear," Halliday said.

"Things have been developing nicely," he said about the new choral society. "In addition to choral concerts, there is also a chamber series I have instigated."

Chorale San Miguel has been performing again, and is taking part in the first annual Festival de las Artes San Miguel de Allende, which is happening in  August.

Halliday will play at two concerts being put on by Chorale San Miguel at the festival, and also at a recital presented by Bel Canto San Miguel and the San Miguel MetOpera Trust featuring rising opera star Yunuet Laguna, who has performed with the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Laguna's career got a major push in San Miguel de Allende, Halliday said, so the concert will be a bit of a homecoming for Laguna before she sings later this year in Germany and at other international venues.

Large choral format

Later in the year, Chorale San Miguel will present a big concert for the Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, on Nov. 2, a celebration of life and death that is a big holiday in Mexico. The program will include Requiem by Michael Hoppe, Early Mexican choral music and two contemporary American works, all repertoire connecting to this sacred day in the Mexican psyche.

The idea is for Chorale San Miguel to present concerts in large choral format, principally Masses, Oratorios, a cappella works, and choral and orchestral compositions from four centuries. The chorale is composed of a core group of 32 auditioned singers, of whom a significant portion are professional singers, joining forces with talented area volunteer choral singers.

Halliday said the chorale performs in a historic 400-year-old Franciscan convent with several magnificent spaces, including a large Baroque church, several cloisters and a chapel called Templo de Tercera Orden. Chorale San Miguel does most of its concerts in the older chapel because the acoustics there are more perfect, given that there is no large dome as in the church.

"I hear various reports on the age of the chapel, but it could be as old as the early 1600s," Halliday said.

"Our use of the complex for concerts is made possible through a 'convenio,' which is a covenant between the Franciscan order and Chorale San Miguel. It is a very rare thing to have this kind of agreement in place," Halliday said.

San Miguel de Allende has a population of about 150,000 and is "very vibrant, very active." It is cosmopolitan and home to a number of expats but still has a very Mexican feel with cobblestone streets, Halliday said.

"There's definitely a segment of the population that's big for the arts."

However, the city "does not have a lot of major music organizations," Halliday said. "There are a lot of local musicians but there's plenty of room to develop a local choral society."

Popular place for expats

The expatriate networking organization InterNations recently ranked Mexico first in a survey of the best countries to move to. InterNations surveyed nearly 12,000 respondents of 177 different nationalities, living in 181 countries. Respondents were asked how their new homes performed on factors including quality of life, cost of living, safety, financial outlook, bureaucracy, and ease of fitting in. Mexico had particularly high scores for personal finance and the ease of settling in.

That might come as news to some people who have been subjected to a frequent barrage of negativity concerning Mexico.

The same could be true for people who hear a lot of negative things about the United States. "It's not to say both countries don't have their problems, but you can be in a vibrant community and don't have to worry about crime," Halliday said.

As for Halliday's Spanish, "My Spanish is far from perfect but it's a lot better since I've been there. I've had to be bilingual. I don't regret acquiring these language skills," he said.

Those skills may have been useful for the Chorale San Miguel's organ project. "We have already raised more than half of our goal of close to hundred thousand dollars (US) to bring this Johnson & Sons pipe organ from Williamstown. It is kind of cool that there is this kind of cross-border activity happening," Halliday said

The organ was in a church in Williamstown that was decommissioned and turned into a day-care center. The center cared about the instrument and wanted to see it saved.

"We were able to purchase it at a very reasonable price and it is currently in Stowe, Pennsylvania, where it is being restored and prepared for delivery to Mexico later in the year. It will be the first major pipe organ to come to the city of San Miguel de Allende in nearly a hundred years," Halliday said.

The organ will be used in concerts the choral group holds in the chapel at the Franciscan complex. The organ will go in the front of the chapel in the left corner under the portrait of the Virgen de Guadalupe (Virgin of Guadalupe).

There are also plans taking shape to organize a choral festival in the complex, perhaps for 2023 or 2024, Halliday said.

Area concerts set

Back in Massachusetts for the summer, Halliday immediately found himself organizing a last-minute replacement concert for the  originally scheduled June 11 program "Arias, Art Song, Musical Theater and Jazz" at the Stone Church Cultural Center in Gilbertville.

The two singers Halliday was going to accompany on the piano both came down with COVID so he put together “The Stone Church Trio” and a new program for June 11 with tenor Stanley Wilson and clarinetist Chester Brezniak.

Besides his recital at Southgate at Shrewsbury, he also performed recently at the Briarwood Community in Worcester. He'll be back in the area to take part in the return of the Massachusetts Symphony Orchestra’s popular "Duo Piano Gala Concert" at Tuckerman Hall on Oct. 29 for the first time since the pandemic.

"I'm very happy to be coming back to live concert work," Halliday said.

He's noticed on his return journeys that "I've seen people started to go back to things" since the height of the pandemic.

Halliday worries that young people had their introduction to music interrupted, "but I have no reason to think we've lost the battle. I think there's resilience in New England," he said about the music traditions here.

"Hopefully these things are coming back to life. It seems like things are coming back to life."

This article originally appeared on Telegram & Gazette: Malcolm Halliday's journey from Master Singers of Worcester to Chorale San Miguel in Mexico