Bach Organ & Arias

Jennifer Ferrand Kelly, soprano, is an accomplished ensemble and solo singer based in Connecticut. She performs regularly with CONCORA and Voce, and has also appeared with the Hartford Chorale, the Greater Middletown Chorale and its chamber ensemble Alchemy, and Collegium Ancora in Providence, RI.

Her solo engagements include Bach’s Mass in B Minor and Handel’s Messiah with Music Worcester, Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy with the Hartford Symphony, and CONCORA’s Bach Clavierfest. She can be heard with Voce on Signum Classics recordings including Blessing: The Music of Paul Mealor and The Nativity.

Reviewers have praised her performances for their artistry and expressiveness: The Worcester Telegram described her phrasing and tone as “gorgeously on target and utterly compelling,” while The Hartford Courant highlighted her “strong musical intelligence” and “excellent breath control.”

Originally from Buffalo, New York, Jennifer earned her undergraduate degree in Vocal Performance from the State University of New York at Geneseo. She is also a clinical psychologist with Hartford HealthCare, where she integrates her deep understanding of human emotion into both her professional and musical life.

Kevin Neel enjoys a versatile career as organist, collaborative pianist, conductor, and singer. He was named in the Diapason Magazine’s 2019 Class of “20 under 30” which recognizes young talents in the fields of organ and harpsichord performance, organ and harpsichord building, carillon, and church music.​​

He has been heard at the organ in numerous venues including Symphony Hall (Boston), the Cathedral of St. Philip (Atlanta, GA), Methuen Memorial Music Hall, College of the Holy Cross (St. Joseph’s Chapel, Worcester), Church of the Advent and Trinity Church (both in Boston). He also has appeared in numerous venues in the southeast. He also has appeared as organ and piano accompanist for multiple choral ensembles in the New England area including The Heritage Chorale from 2019-2025. Currently he serves as Accompanist for The Boston Cecilia.​​​

He is Director of Music and Organist at All Saints, Worcester where he directs the All Saints Choir (choristers and adults), manages special music events, oversees music education programs, plays the Rice Memorial Organ (IV/132 Aeolian Skinner Op. 909), and collaborates with Worcester-area music and arts organizations. While at All Saints, he has commissioned and premiered choral music of Grace Coberly and Zachary Wadsworth. As a conductor, he has been seen in venues across Massachusetts (including Mechanics Hall, Worcester) as well as in New York City. He also maintains a small studio of private organ students at All Saints.

From 2016-2020 he co-artistic directed “et al.,” (formerly “The Brookline Consort”) which he co-founded with soprano Carey Shunskis. et al. was a project-based choral ensemble of Boston-area professional singers. As a singer, he has also sung with the Marsh Chapel Choir, Emmanuel Music, Cantata Singers, and VOICES 21C.

He believes in inspiring the next generation of musicians and has served the American Guild of Organists in several capacities, most recently as Director of the 2025 Pipe Organ Encounter Advanced in Worcester, Mass., the first Advanced POE held since the COVID-19 pandemic. He will serve in a similar capacity as Director of the POE-A in Hartford, Connecticut in summer 2026. He also serves as the Sub-Dean of the Worcester Chapter of the AGO and has previously served as the first National Convener of American Guild of Organists Young Organists (AGOYO) as well as on the National Nominating Committee.

Previously he was Organist and Chapel Choir Director at Emmanuel Church, Boston from 2016-2021. He also served as the Parish Operations Manager at Emmanuel Church from 2019-2021 and was the Executive Director for Coro Allegro from 2016-2019. He holds a Masters of Sacred Music degree from Boston University in Choral Conducting with primary professors Ann Howard Jones, Scott Allen Jarrett, and Peter Sykes, and a Bachelors of Music degree from Indiana University in Organ Performance with primary professors Janette Fishell, Bruce Neswick, Jeffrey Smith and Todd Wilson. Kevin is originally from the Charlotte, NC area where he studied organ with David Lowry and Shirley Fishburne and piano with Patsy Surratt.

Now in his sixteenth year as Artistic Director of the Worcester Chorus, Chris also serves as conductor of the Connecticut Choral Artists (CONCORA), Connecticut’s oldest professional choir. In May 2024, Chris launched THE COMPLETE BACH, a 132-concert project to present live performances of all of J.S. Bach’s works for the first time ever in America. This monumental undertaking, under the auspices of Music Worcester, was inspired by Chris’s BACH2010 project, in which his Sydneian Bach Choir and Orchestra performed all of Bach’s choral cantatas in Sydney, Australia. THE COMPLETE BACH brings together local ensembles as well as internationally recognized performers such as pianists Jeremy Denk and Simone Dinnerstein, and Boston’s Handel & Haydn Society and Emmanuel Music.

His musical interests hardly stop in the eighteenth century, however. Chris has conducted much of the most prominent largescale choral-orchestral repertoire, including major works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Fauré, Vaughan Williams, Poulenc, and Britten; a career highlight was the 2022 performance by the Worcester and Masterwork Choruses of Verdi’s Requiem at Carnegie Hall. He has also performed many works by contemporary composers and has premiered works by such composers as Ricky Ian Gordon, Gwyneth Walker, Martin Sedek, Robert Convery, Anna K Jacobs, and Amy Bernon. His choirs have collaborated with a number of orchestras, such as the Juilliard Orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico, and the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, in venues that include Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and Radio City Music Hall in New York, as well as the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City. Chris has prepared choirs for major international conductors, including Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Simone Young, Carlos Miguel Prieto, and William Boughton, as well as for Broadway legend Patti Lupone and Ray Davies of the Kinks. For a decade, Chris was conductor of the Masterwork Chorus in New Jersey, with whom he performed Handel’s Messiah annually at Carnegie Hall; he also led the Dessoff Choir in New York City from 2010 to 2016. Chris made his conducting debut with the New Haven Symphony in 2015.

A committed music educator, Chris has served on the faculty of the Taft School, Sydney Grammar School, Hotchkiss Summer Portals, and Holy Cross College. He founded the Litchfield County Children’s Choir in 1990, and has conducted numerous middle and high school regional and All-State choirs in New England, New York and Australia. He presented two documentaries with SBS-TV, an Australian national public television network, and has given several presentations at conferences for American Choral Directors Association and Australian National Kodàly Association. Chris has been a guest conductor at Emmanuel Church in Boston, a church renowned for its five-decade Bach cantata project, and he currently serves as Music Director of St John’s Episcopal Church in Stamford, Connecticut.

A pianist and keyboard continuist, Chris holds degrees from the Hartt School, the Yale School of Music (where he studied choral conducting with Marguerite Brooks) and the University of Sydney. He researched the performance history of Bach’s B Minor Mass in New York City for his PhD in Musicology; his dissertation won the American Choral Directors Association’s 2012 Julius Herford Prize for outstanding doctoral thesis in choral music.