Directors
Holly MacEwen Krafka, the founder of the New World Chorale, has been a conductor, educator, and performer in a wide range of musical activities for more than 25 years. A native of Wellesley, Massachusetts, she is a graduate of Gettysburg College and holds a master’s degree in choral conducting from Boston Conservatory. As a singer, Ms. Krafka was a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for 20 years and performed with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under internationally renowned conductors including Leonard Bernstein, Sir Colin Davis, and Seiji Ozawa at Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, Hong Kong, and Japan. Ms. Krafka’s children’s choirs have performed in venues ranging from Broadway shows at Boston’s Colonial Theater to the Konzerthaus in Vienna, Austria.
Ms. Krafka is a regular guest conductor with the Claflin Hill Symphony Orchestra in Milford, Massachusetts. She has led the orchestra and the New World Chorale in performances of the Mozart Requiem, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy ( with Mr. Zielinski as piano soloist), Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Mendelssohn’s Elijah, Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, and, most recently, South Pacific in Concert.
Ms. Krafka has been music director and vocal director in a number of local area churches and school systems, most recently at Bishop Feehan High School in Attleboro, Massachusetts. She resides in Milford, Massachusetts with her husband and New World Chorale bass Michael, and their three sons, Luke, Peter, and Nicholas.
John Zielinski, co-director of the New World Chorale, was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, where he studied piano and organ performance at Seattle University and received a degree in physics from the University of Washington. His performances include tours featuring Schumann’s Piano Concerto and Beethoven's Piano Concerto #3, and a recital tour of South America with appearances in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile. His performances also include the premiere of Gregory Short’s American Concerto with the Broadway Symphony, and a recital of new music by Pacific Northwest Composers at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall. He performed the piano solo part in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy Op. 80 with the Claflin Hill Symphony and the New World Chorale.
Mr. Zielinski is sought after as a composer and has had the New World Chorale perform his arrangement of spirituals, How Sweet the Sound, and his motet Infelix Ego for chorus and orchestra. His compositions have been performed throughout the United States and Mexico; they include solo piano and organ music, chamber music, and several large choral and orchestral pieces. The Bishop Feehan Concert Choir commissioned him to premiere a new piece for chorus, Set Your Heart On Things Above, in May 2004.
Mr. Zielinski currently is Minister of Music at Emmanuel Lutheran Church in Norwood, Massachuestts and a staff pianist at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.
“John Zielinski was a demon of ebb and flow at the organ” — The Phoenix, Dec. 4, 2007