One of America’s leading choral conductors, Kent Tritle marks his seventh season as Music Director of the Oratorio Society of New York. During the fall, he conducted members of the Society at the “International Festival of Sacred Music and Art” in Rome, including at the opening Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica. With tonight’s performance of the rarely performed Mozart arrangement of Messiah, he brings a new breadth to the Society’s tradition of annual performances. In April Tritle will lead the Society, in partnership with Carnegie Hall, in a concert celebrating the Hall’s 120th anniversary by performing the Dvořák: Stabat mater and the world premiere of Juraj Filas’s Song of Solomon, which was commissioned for the Society. 
     Under his leadership, in 2010 the Society’s bass section joined the New York Philharmonic and music director Alan Gilbert for a performance of Varèse’s Nocturnal, part of Lincoln Center’s two-day survey of the composer’s works. Two years earlier, the Society joined the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish,” also conducted by Alan Gilbert, as part of the “Bernstein: The Best of all Possible Worlds” festival.
     Called “the brightest star in New York’s choral music world” by the New York Times, Kent Tritle hosts “The Choral Mix with Kent Tritle,” a weekly WQXR show that explores the extraordinary riches of the choral repertoire every Sunday at 7:00 AM. and 11:00 PM. He is also Director of Cathedral Music and organist at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Music Director of Musica Sacra, New York’s longest continuously performing professional chorus. Later this season, Tritle will give an organ recital as his farewell concert with “Sacred Music in a Sacred Space,” the acclaimed concert series he founded in 1989 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. From 1996 to 2004, he was Music Director of the Emmy-nominated Dessoff Choirs, winners of the ASCAP/Chorus America award for adventurous programming of contemporary music. 
     Mr. Tritle has prepared choruses for such esteemed conductors as Philippe Entremont, Christoph von Dohnányi, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas, Robert Spano, Leon Botstein, and Dennis Russell Davies. Among the soloists with whom he has collaborated are singers Renée Fleming, Jessye Norman, Marilyn Horne, Susan Graham, and Sherrill Milnes, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, pianist André Previn, and actor Tony Randall.
     An acclaimed organ virtuoso, Mr. Tritle is the organist of the New York Philharmonic and the American Symphony Orchestra. He has often appeared as a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and performs regularly in Europe and across the United States. Recital venues have included the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Church of St. Sulpice, Dresden’s Hofkirche, King’s College at Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey. 
     Kent Tritle holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from the Juilliard School in organ performance and choral conducting and has been on the Juilliard faculty since 1996. He currently directs a graduate practicum on oratorio in collaboration with the school’s Vocal Arts Department and teaches choral conducting. In addition, he is Director of Choral Activities at the Manhattan School of Music. He has been featured in the New York Times and on “ABC World News Tonight,” National Public Radio, and Minnesota Public Radio.

musicdirector@oratoriosocietyofny.org

www.kenttritle.com