South Salem resident and musical conductor Harold Rosenbaum is celebrating a double anniversary this year: 40 years with his Canticum Novum Singers (“I started it when I graduated from college,” he recalls) and 25 with The New York Virtuoso Singers. To commemorate the latter occasion, Rosenbaum commissioned works by 25 major American composers, 12 of whom are Pulitzer Prize winners. One concert was performed last October, and the balance of the new works will be performed on March 3 at Kaufman Center’s Merkin Concert Hall in Manhattan, where the group presented its first concert in 1988.
“The New York Virtuoso Singers perform everything from Bach to Ellington, but we really specialize in living American composers,” Rosenbaum says. “I’ve received about ten thousand unpublished scores by composers over the past twenty-five years and performed about one hundred twenty-five of them. It’s been a pleasure to discover brilliant works from all over the country.”
Both The Canticum Novum Singers and The New York Virtuoso Singers have performed at venues such as Carnegie Hall, Tanglewood, and Julliard. Rosenbaum is also the organist at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Katonah.
