Not bad for a group that nearly croaked from an under-the-radar fiscal crisis just months before the pandemic began.

“I became the chorale’s treasurer in 2018,” says Catherine Gronquist, who is now the organization’s president, “and I didn’t realize what a mess it was until I got in there.” A managing director at Morgan Stanley for more than 27 years, Gronquist was recruited for her financial background by Janice Mayer, who served as the chorale’s managing director from May 2015 to January 2020.

“Rumors were circulating, but we didn’t know the extent of how badly the board was struggling,” says soprano Kathlene Ritch, a long-time chorale member. “The end-of-year fundraising tended to make things seem OK.”

In the fall of 2019, Gronquist took Ritch, who was by then the singer representative on the organization’s board, to lunch. “She sat me down,” Ritch says, “and told me, ‘We have enough [money] to honor the contracts for next summer. But after that, I don’t know if there’s going to be a Desert Chorale anymore.’ And I was floored.”

Like almost all small nonprofits, the chorale operated without a financial safety net, running modest surpluses in some years and modest deficits in others. At the end of its 2015 fiscal year, it had a cash cushion of just over $3,000.

Then the group incurred significant operating losses in three of the four fiscal years that followed, ending FY2019 with an accumulated deficit totaling more than $160,000.

Mayer and Desert Chorale parted ways in late 2019. A board search committee for her successor came up with an audacious solution — hire Emma Marzen, who had just turned 26, to replace her, starting in January 2020.

Hiring the young managing director wasn’t quite as crazy as it might initially read — Marzen had worked for Desert Chorale for two years as its box office manager and community liaison, and then for the Santa Fe Opera as its board relations manager for almost as long.

In fact, it turned out to be a masterstroke, in part because of her knowledge of Santa Fe, its donor community, and the chorale, and in part because the pandemic gave the group an opportunity to address its major issues.

“It was a set of circumstances that you could never plan for, that you could never anticipate, but I do think it helped the organization focus on what it needed to do,” Gronquist says. “We had some breathing room to recast ourselves.”

At the time, however, matters seemed bleak, especially for choral groups. One of the first indicators for how quickly COVID could spread came early in 2020, when 87% of the participants in a Washington state choir contracted it after a rehearsal with just one infected member present.

Marzen’s response was counterintuitive. “We have to raise some money,” Gronquist recalls her saying, so the Keep Our Voices Singing campaign was launched with an initial goal of $300,000.

“Everyone’s eyes opened wide,” Artistic Director Joshua Habermann remembers, “and their jaws dropped to the floor when she mentioned the amount. At that point, we didn’t know if we’d still exist in six months or six years, but we not only achieved the goal but blew past it by quite a lot.”

Part of the funding supported the chorale’s online activities during the pandemic and the rest helped eliminate its accumulated deficit.

Marzen’s interest in music started at an early age. “I attempted to play violin for a number of years in elementary and middle school before realizing I needed to turn my focus to my true love of singing,” she tells Pasatiempo.

In a combination of passion and pragmatism, she majored in music business at the University of Miami while continuing to sing in its choral program. After internships at New York’s Le Poisson Rouge and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, she launched her career at the Desert Chorale.

Marzen describes her subsequent tenure at the opera as “a fantastic opportunity to hone my skills” while also having a where-do-you-see-yourself-in-five-years goal of becoming an executive director somewhere.

The timeline got significantly compressed, and the movers didn’t have to be hired when Desert Chorale offered Marzen her ultimate goal just two years later. She admits the group’s messy financial situation made the choice to leave the opera “a bit daunting.”

“Ultimately, I was just really excited about the possibility. I love this organization,” Marzen says. “I believed we could turn it around, and I knew there were people there who also believed that. With that kind of passion and with that [artistic] product, we could only go up from there, right?

Marzen was right about the direction, but no one could have reasonably anticipated the trajectory. With an energized board and donor base, plus the pandemic-induced opportunity to focus on fundraising and audience building, the chorale’s relaunch path resembled that of a rocket more than an airplane.

Thanks to good expense controls, increased contributions, and some significant bequests, Desert Chorale’s financial position has improved by more than $2.35 million over the last five years. Ticket sales also demonstrate an encouraging trend, having risen by 42% since 2022.

For Habermann, Desert Chorale’s recent performance at the choral music conference was a homecoming of sorts — he was the director of the Dallas Symphony Chorus for more than a decade — and a vote of confidence in his skills. Most of the choruses were chosen by a blind audition process but the chorale was asked by the conference organizers to participate based on its quality and innovative repertory.

“We’re able to do so much more on the artistic side now because of the planning, the thoughtful fundraising, the relationship building, and the steadiness of our administrative team,” Habermann says.

A “commissioning club” with the chorale’s donor pool has now underwritten a new work for six consecutive years, with the upcoming summer season including the world premieres of two such commissions. The group is also able to move beyond a cappella singing or keyboard accompaniment at times, as evidenced by the presence of a chamber orchestra for one of the 2025 concert programs.

The chorale’s summer season begins on July 13 with Cantos y Cuentos, featuring Latin American music along with guitarist Nacha Mendez. Opening on July 20, the second program consists of two longer works by contemporary female composers accompanied by chamber orchestra, Sarah Snider’s Mass for the Endangered and Caroline Shaw’s To the Hands.

Roots & Rivers rounds out the season with a celebration of Desert Chorale commissions, including the world premiere of Nigerian American composer Shawn E. Okpebholo’s The American Road: Six Songs of the Enslaved, Embattled and Emancipated, an extended work making use of folk songs and spirituals. Kile Smith’s Northland, Jocelyn Hagen’s Caminante, and Reena Esmail’s The Tipping Point are also on the program, which opens on July 24.