Projo Politics Blog

Towering above the other singers performing Handel’s Messiah in Veterans Memorial Auditorium a week ago was a familiar face in governmental circles: state Health Insurance Commissioner Christopher Koller.

With a tinge of self-deprecating humor, the 6-foot, 7-inch Koller describes his voice as a “booming tenor” and his four-year run with the Providence Singers as his “contribution to the choral arts.”

Koller said he sang in his Dartmouth College glee club and community choruses, and then took a 12-year break until he commented on the Providence Singers T-shirt worn at a group event by the husband of a former coworker at Neighborhood Health Plan. On the spot, he said, “I got recruited.”

“It’s really fun to do something that has nothing to do with work,” he said last week. “It brings [together] people from all walks of life. Physicians, students, music teachers, financial analysts.” Then of course, there was the “head rush” of singing at the Newport Jazz Festival, Lincoln Center in New York, and most recently, accompanying the Rhode Island Philharmonic in the packed Vets Auditorium.

In the lobby after the Vets performance, Koller saw a large number of people he knew from his day job, including former state Health Director Patricia Nolan, proving in his mind “the two degrees of separation” between “the people on stage and the people in the audience.”

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