Name: Summer Music 2024 | Summer Chorus – Betsy Burleigh, conductor
Start: 2024-07-13T16:00:00
Location: Auer Hall

Betsy Burleigh

Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Betsy Burleigh, Thomas R Kasdorf Professor of Choral Conducting and chair of the Choral Conducting Department at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music since the fall of 2013, served as music director of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh from 2006 to 2015. She led the Mendelssohn Choir in performances of Brahms’ Requiem, Bach’s B-Minor Mass, Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, and Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor and prepared the choir for numerous performances with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO). As a guest conductor, Burleigh has led the PSO, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Akron Symphony, and Canton Symphony. Theater engagements have included music direction at Opera Cleveland and the Cleveland Public Theater. In March 2016, she prepared the Tanglewood Festival Chorus for a performance with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and music director Andris Nelsons. Acclaimed for her oratorio conducting, Burleigh’s 2012 Chorus pro Musica performance of Haydn’s Creation was praised in The Boston Globe as an “expansive, poetic reading” and in The Boston Phoenix as “a stirring and elegant, lilting and expansive performance.” Her 2010 rendition of Orff’s Carmina Burana was praised as being both “nuanced” and “hair-raising” by The Boston Musical Intelligencer. She won the 2000 Northern Ohio Live Achievement Award for best classical/opera performance for Ulmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis with the Cleveland Public Theatre and conducted the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus on an Emmy Award–winning concert for the 9/11 Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.