OUR COMPOSERS
Kevin Riehle
Kevin Raymond Riehle founded CANTARE Houston in spring 2003 to offer to Houston singers and audiences performances of great choral music of great diversity, deep sensitivity and exacting standards. CANTARE Houston has won critical and popular acclaim, being characterized has singing with energy, precision and great heart. The choir has collaborated with Houston’s Mercury Orchestra, The Rob Landes Trio, Divisi Strings, pianists Timothy Hester, Keith Weber, and composer/pianist Ola Gjeilo. At the Museum of Fine Arts Houston CANTARE's “traveling concerts” of music pairing great art and great a cappella choral music has struck singular distinction for programmatic innovations. The choir's “Christmas at MFAH” concerts are perennial sell-outs. Through distinctive and adventuresome programming, CANTARE has won the hearts and minds of concert-goers across Houston and beyond.
Kevin Riehle has enjoyed a long and varied career as a conductor and choral musician, having prepared choirs for concert and liturgy for nearly 30 years. At home in a wide range of musical genres, his work has earned critical and popular praise throughout the country. In addition to CANTARE, Kevin is director of choral activities at James E. Taylor H.S. (Katy, TX ISD) and is the choirmaster for Houston's St. Martin's Episcopal Church. He spent two years (2008, 2009) as chorus master for the Houston Gilbert and Sullivan Society and was artistic director of the Lubbock Civic Chorale from 1984-87 and has prepared choruses for the Lubbock Symphony and East Texas Symphony Orchestras. He has conducted in Carnegie Hall, in 2001 directing Beethoven’s Mass in C and returned in 2003 to lead choral/orchestral performances of Te Deum settings by Holst and Haydn, and in January 2010 conducting Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass. He has conducted much of the standard choral/orchestral repertoire including mass and requiem settings, cantatas, motets and newly-commissioned works.
He is also at home on the musical theater stage, having produced and conducted Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” “Godspell,” “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” “Snoopy,” and “Seussical the Musical,” Rodger’s and Hammerstein classic “The King and I” and “Seussical the Musical” and Sondheim's "Into the Woods."
As a composer, Riehle’s works have found a regular place in the choral repertoire in the US and abroad and are listed in the catalogues of Oxford University Press, Alliance Music, Choristers Guild, and Abingdon Press. He holds degrees from Ohio Northern University, Southern Methodist University, with post-graduate work at Texas Tech University, and is a candidate for the DMA in Choral Conducting degree at the University of Houston's Moores School of Music. He is married to Norma Riehle, a graphic and web designer and senior design manager for NRG Energy of Houston.
