The War Requiem, Op. 66, is a large-scale setting of the Requiem composed by Benjamin Britten mostly in 1961 and completed in January 1962. The War Requiem was performed for the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, which was built after the original fourteenth-century structure was destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. The traditional Latin texts are interspersed, in telling juxtaposition, with extra-liturgical poems by Wilfred Owen, written during World War I.
Robert Lawson Shaw was an American conductor most famous for his work with his namesake Chorale, with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus, and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. He was known for drawing public attention to choral music through his wide-ranging influence and mentoring of younger conductors, the high standard of his recordings, his support for racial integration in his choruses, and his support for modern music, winning many awards throughout his career.
Julian Anderson is a British composer and teacher of composition.
Westminster Choir College (WCC) is a historic conservatory of music currently operating on the campus of Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Rider's College of Arts and Sciences, the college under which the historic institution has been reorganized, consists of Westminster Choir College as well as three additional schools.
James Litton was an American musician, who directed the American Boychoir from 1985 to 2001, and is widely recognized as one of the leading choral conductors of the day.
Jeffrey Douma is the Director of the Yale Glee Club and the Marshall Bartholomew Professor in the Practice of Choral Music at the Yale School of Music. He is the founding Director of the Yale Choral Artists and serves as Artistic Director of the Yale International Choral Festival.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Richard Sidney Hickox was an English conductor of choral, orchestral and operatic music.
Simon Halsey, CBE is an English choral conductor. He is the chorus director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus, a position he has held since 1983, and has been chorus director of the London Symphony Chorus since 2012. He is also artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Youth Choral Programme and the director of the BBC Proms Youth Choir, and conductor laureate of the Berlin Radio Choir. He is professor and director of choral activities at the University of Birmingham.
Missa Latina is a classical music composition written by the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra. The work was written for SATB chorus with two soloists, and a symphonic orchestra. It was co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and The Choral Arts Society of Washington and was written through 2003–2005. It premiered in 2006 at Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and was also performed in the 51st Casals Festival in Puerto Rico. The Washington Times judged it "the most significant symphonic premiere in the District since the late Benjamin Britten's stunning War Requiem was first performed in the still-unfinished Washington National Cathedral in the late 1960s."
Mark Bailey is an American conductor and baroque violist. He is the founder and artistic director of the American Baroque Orchestra. Bailey specializes in Slavic music of the 17th and 18th centuries, in addition to baroque, classical, and romantic repertoire, and is the current director of the Yale Russian Chorus. Bailey frequently guest conducts ensembles such as the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Cappella Romana, The Portland Baroque Orchestra, and Pro Coro Canada. He often gives presentations on Slavic baroque music and historical performance practice, and has been a principal guest speaker for the Great Performers series, the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York City, the 2016 Musicking Conference at the University of Oregon, and the Indiana University International Performance Practice Conference.
Donald Nally is an American conductor, chorus master, and professor of conducting, specializing in chamber choirs, opera, and new music. He is conductor of the professional new-music choir, The Crossing, based in Philadelphia. He teaches graduate students at Northwestern University's Bienen School of Music.
David Hayes is an American conductor.
The Dessoff Choirs is an independent chorus based in New York City. Margarete Dessoff established the organization in 1930 as the union of two choirs she directed, the Adesdi chorus and the A Cappella Singers, whence the plural Choirs. Today, the plural connotes Dessoff's various ensembles, which range from the large Dessoff Symphonic Choir, which appears with major orchestras, to the Dessoff Chamber Choir, which performs in more intimate settings.
Julius Penson Williams, is an American composer, conductor, and college professor. He is currently president of the Conductors Guild. An author of both instrumental and vocal music, Julius Williams has composed operas, symphonies, and chorus works for stage, concert hall, film, and television. Primarily a classically trained musician, Williams also writes in genres including gospel, jazz, and other contemporary forms.
Guy Protheroe is a British conductor, musical director, composer and musicologist/forensic musicologist. He has been conductor and musical director of the contemporary music ensemble Spectrum and the English Chamber Choir throughout his career. He has known for his collaboration with artists, in particular Rick Wakeman, Vangelis and Eric Lévi.
Julian James Wachner is an American composer, conductor, and keyboardist. From 2011 to 2022, he served as the Director of Music and the Arts at Trinity Wall Street, conducting the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, the Trinity Baroque Orchestra, and NOVUS NY. Wachner recorded five albums with these ensembles, primarily for the Musica Omnia label. From 2008 to 2017, he served as the Director of The Washington Chorus. In March 2018, Wachner was named Artistic Director of the Grand Rapids Bach Festival, an affiliate of the Grand Rapids Symphony, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Jake Runestad is an American composer and conductor of classical music based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has composed music for a wide variety of musical genres and ensembles, but has achieved greatest acclaim for his work in the genres of opera, orchestral music, choral music, and wind ensemble. One of his principal collaborators for musical texts has been Todd Boss.
Dreams of the Fallen is a choral symphony-concerto for solo piano, SATB chorus, and orchestra with music by the composer Jake Runestad set to texts of the poet Brian Turner, a veteran of the Iraq War. The work was first performed on Veterans Day, 11 November 2013, at The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The participating ensembles included the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Chorus of New Orleans, the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, the Rockford Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, the Philharmonic of Southern New Jersey, and the Virginia Arts Festival. Dreams of the Fallen earned its composer the Morton Gould Young Composer Award from the ASCAP Foundation in 2016. It received its New York City premiere with the West Point Glee Club, the New Amsterdam Singers, the Young New Yorkers' Chorus, and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony at Carnegie Hall on 19 November 2016, conducted by David Bernard.
The GRAMMY® Award-winning National Children's Chorus of the United States of America (NCC) is a private, non-profit organization, and one of the largest children's choruses in the world. It has 1,000 choristers and its members are between the ages of five and eighteen, and divided into Junior Division and Senior Division across its seven chapter cities - Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Austin, Dallas and Boston.
