The Ditson Conductor’s Award, an annual prize presented by Columbia University for contributions to the advancement of American music, is to be presented to Harold Rosenbaum at a concert by the New York Virtuoso Singers at Merkin Concert Hall on Sunday afternoon. Mr. Rosenbaum founded the ensemble in 1988, and is also the founder and conductor of the Canticum Novum Singers and the director of the Harold Rosenbaum Choral Conducting Institute, held annually at Columbia and the State University of New York at Buffalo. The award, which was established in 1945, includes a citation and $5,000.
The selection of Mr. Rosenbaum is unusual. Past winners of the award – among them, James Levine, Leonard Bernstein, George Manahan, Christopher Keene, Mstislav Rostropovich, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy and last year’s winner, Jeffrey Milarsky – have been orchestral conductors.
But the contemporary American choral repertory is enormous and growing, and Mr. Rosenbaum is one of several conductors who have made a specialty of it, within a broader range of works stretching back to the Renaissance. Mr. Rosenbaum has given the world premieres of about 475 works, more than 60 of which he commissioned. His concert on Sunday includes works by Ernst Krenek, Thea Musgrave, Yotam Haber, Karen Siegel and Michael Schachter, most of them premieres.
“I hope that the Ditson Award will focus even more attention on the enormous number of extremely gifted composers in this country writing choral music, and on the opportunities to hear these works performed,” Mr. Rosenbaum said in a statement. “Frankly, it feels wonderful to be recognized for decades of obsessive devotion to this repertoire and to modern music in general.”