It took eight months of looking for a new music director at Community Church before the committee realized the right man for the job was right under their noses.
Ryan Kasten, associate music director and former director Jose Daniel Flores’ right-hand man from 2009 until last summer when Flores left, has been named to the post Flores once occupied.
“We’ve got a rising star in Ryan,” says Steve Higgins, who chaired the church’s search committee. “We’ve seen him grow dramatically.”
The position drew candidates with a range of experience, from recent conservatory graduates to others looking at a final post prior to retirement. Higgins says the committee received 100 applications for the position from as far away as Austria, Korea, Israel and England. “There were world class musicians, great, great, people,” says Higgins. “The process was daunting at first. We had established such a strong musical ministry, and Jose Daniel was a tough act to follow.”
Even as the top several candidates came and auditioned for the committee and with the church choir, it became clear, Higgins said, that though Kasten had not formally applied, he was the most qualified candidate.
“We had him right under our nose,” Higgins says. “Without really knowing it, he had an eight-month audition. And he did a fantastic job. He really stepped it up.”
“I didn’t put my name in the hat at the beginning with the fear that if I didn’t get it, it would be awkward. I really didn’t want to compete for it. But a week before they announced, the committee asked me to submit my name officially,” says Kasten.
When a call came from the senior minister, Rev. Bob Baggott, asking him to lunch, Kasten “figured he wanted to break the news that they’d made a decision.”
Instead, Baggott invited him to apply. Kasten interviewed formally the next night, and the appointment was announced to the congregation the following Sunday.
Now it’s Kasten’s turn to hire his own associate director. That, too, has turned into an international search and is producing stellar candidates, he says. He hopes to have the position filled by mid- to late June. “I’ve had a few high caliber organists a few years older than I am that have served in big churches or cathedrals for the latter part of their career,” he says. Hiring one of them would be “a remarkable thing,” Kasten says.
In the interim this summer, Alcee Chriss III will be helping out with organ performances. Chriss, who is graduating from Oberlin Conservatory and is headed to McGill University’s conservatory this fall, was the recitalist last year at the Songsun Lee Memorial Concert in December; he will perform here again in January.
Kasten is in the final stages of creating a chamber choir, a 22-voice “high-caliber ensemble” that would perform music from all periods. The new choir would replace the Atlantic Schola Cantorum begun by Flores and disbanded when he left last summer to assume a post with a community choir in Albany.
Once the new group is formed, Kasten will oversee around 200 singers and bell ringers, including children.
With the new appointment as music director, Kasten has resigned as director of the Indialantic Chamber Singers, a job he only started last fall. And he has changed programs for his doctoral degree, from one in organ performance at Florida State University, where he earned one of two master’s degrees, to an on-line program through the Graduate Theological Foundation designed to help busy professionals wrap up a graduate degree. “It was just too hard for me to get away from Vero,” he says of the FSU doctoral program for which he had yet to perform several concerts in Tallahassee required to complete the program.
The position at Community requires mastery of the church’s extraordinary $1.6 million, 4,000-pipe Lively Fulcher organ, installed in 2010 after an extensive $12 million renovation of the sanctuary tailoring it to the organ’s sound.
The music director also leads the church’s numerous choral and instrumental groups, and the scheduling of concerts beyond church services, occasionally including outside performers.
Those added concerts have been considerably scaled back since Flores’ departure, with a focus toward making the music at Community Church affordable, if not free.
Previously, the church’s secular concerts included such groups as Chanticleer, Canadian Brass Quintet and the Vienna Boys Choir. But increasingly, those groups lost money for the church due at least in part, Kasten says, to Vero’s jammed cultural schedule and high ticket prices. “We have to look at: Is there really a need for another venue?” he says.
Nor is there likely to be a resumption of the large scale performances of requiem masses Flores had instituted in his final two years. “Not unless I can find a wonderful donor,” Kasten says.
The announcement of Kasten’s appointment drew a thunderous three-minute ovation from the congregation, says Baggott. And the reception was even wilder when the choir was told in advance. “I knew they loved him,” says Baggott. “I didn’t know they adored him.”