Harold Rosenbaum will celebrate his 75th birthday by conducting a concert with his New York Virtuoso Singers on Saturday, January 25, 2025. Here's a preview, in Harold's own words.

I was the choirmaster for Lukas Foss's Brooklyn Philharmonic for many years. My wonderful volunteer chorus, The Canticum Novum Singers, collaborated with that fine orchestra more than a dozen times. But one day Lukas asked me to conduct the American premiere of Hans Werner Henze's a cappella choral work Orpheus Behind the Wire with a professional choir he wanted formed, called The Brooklyn Philharmonic Singers. Now The Canticum Novum Singers did some tough music over the years, but nothing quite as difficult as this. There was no piano reduction of this work, which was sometimes in 12 parts. I played through the piece virtually every day for an hour -- chord by chord -- until I felt convinced that if anyone made mistakes in my rehearsals, I would hear them. Fast forward: we pulled it off, got a great New York Times review, and I was ready to start a professional chorus of my own. Thus, The New York Virtuoso Singers was born. Every moment of Orpheus Behind the Wire is chillingly gorgeous. I am so happy to perform it for the second time, 37 years later.

Like those of Benjamin Britten, each of Thea Musgrave's chamber choral works is wonderful. I have conducted them all by both composers. (I can use the same accolade for other composers' choral music, such as Josquin, Bach, Brahms and William Schuman.) But the piece I will conduct at the January 25, 2025 concert, For the Time Being: Advent, is Thea's best, in my humble opinion. In fact, each of the four pieces on the concert is the best by the composers on the program (again, in my humble opinion). For the Time Being: Advent is relentlessly brilliant and penetrating.

George Perle, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, is less well-known than the others on the program, having written very little choral music. Said Andrew Porter in The New Yorker, "Perle's renown as an analyst and scholar may have diverted some of the attention that should be given to his merits as a composer. What matters to listeners is his achievement: the vividness of his melodic gestures, the lively rhythmic sense, the clarity and shapeliness of his discourse and, quite simply, the charm and grace of his utterance." George was my orchestration teacher when I was an undergraduate at Queens College. The first words he uttered were, "I'm telling you right now, I hate teaching." But his music is sublime!

Milton Babbitt's music did not appeal to the masses, obviously. Speaking of masses, in 2008 or so, he handed me a piece he wrote in 1938 called Music for the Mass, which had not yet been published (!). Since he knew I had my Harold Rosenbaum Choral Series with G. Schirmer, he asked me to get it published. It took a few years, but copies arrived at his home on his 94th birthday and he was thrilled. It is tonal and masterly, like all of Elliott Carter's early works. Milton's Three Cultivated Choruses, a set of madrigals which we are performing at the January concert, is utterly charming and decidedly atonal!

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The concert, entitled "Exile and Return," takes place on Saturday, January 25, 2025 at 2:00 PM at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, 487 Hudson Street. For tickets, visit cvi.yapsody.com. For more about Harold Rosenbaum, visit www.haroldrosenbaum.com.