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 Harold Rosenbaum is one of the most accomplished and critically acclaimed choral conductors of our time. He is the winner of the 2008 American Composer Alliance's Laurel Leaf Award, given in recognition of "distinguished achievement in fostering and encouraging American music." Among the recipients of the Laurel Leaf have been the Juilliard String Quartet, Leonard Slatkin, Leopold Stokowski, George Szell, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He is founder and artistic director of two major New York City choirs: The New York Virtuoso Singers (1987), and The Canticum Novum Singers (1973). Mr. Rosenbaum has conducted close to 1,500 concerts with these choirs and with others, including his Westchester Oratorio Society, and his choirs at The Juilliard School, Queens College, Adelphi University, and currently at the University at Buffalo. In addition, he has collaborated over 100 times with leading orchestras in New York City. He is also a consultant to G. Schirmer Inc. ("Harold Rosenbaum Choral Series"), and Hal Leonard Music Corporation.
Mr. Rosenbaum has created a commissioning program for composers, and an annual choral composition competition. He has premiered close to 250 works, including compositions by Ravel (in Paris), Schnittke, Henze, Berio, and Perle. Other highlights in his distinguished career include over 100 concerts on 22 European tours, on which he has conducted the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, L'Orchestre d'Europe, the New Prague Collegium, and the Madeira Bach Festival Orchestra, and appearances in Festivals in Portugal, Italy, and England. Mr. Rosenbaum is also Artistic Director of The Sound of the Baltics Choral Cruise, and The Society for Universal Sacred Music.
His discography includes SONY Classical, CRI, Bridge Records, Koch International, DRG,and Capstone Records.
 DANIEL PAGET, Music Director of the Westchester Chorale since 1984, has led highly-praised performances of works ranging from the a cappella repertoire of the Renaissance to the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten. He has served as Director of Choral Activities at the Manhattan School of Music for 12 years, and founded the Barnard-Columbia Chorus of Columbia University, where he was educated. He has conducted the Paget Chorale, a professional chamber vocal ensemble, at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, and also founded and led the Apollo Chamber Orchestra. Mr. Paget has recorded new choral works for Atlantic Records, CRI and others. He has been described by The New York Times as “a stimulating interpreter whose energy and enthusiasm are thoroughly infectious.”
Under his leadership, the Westchester Chorale has presented traditional repertory in the light of new perspectives incorporating modern scholarship, while also introducing overlooked gems. Recent concerts include A Clash of Titans, exploring Handel’s early experience in Italy and his relations there with Vivaldi and D. Scarlatti; Glorious Chorus and Brass, which introduced Mr. Paget’s new arrangement for chorus and brass ensemble of Charles Ives’ General William Booth Enters into Heaven; and, in collaboration with the Westchester Chamber Orchestra, a concert-with-commentary entitled The Mozart Requiem: the Evolution of a Masterwork, illuminating Mozart’s use of Handel and Bach as musical sources for the Requiem.
A composer and arranger, Mr. Paget’s works have been performed around the country and abroad. His One Hundred Roses, consisting of seven Neapolitan songs arranged for flute and chamber ensemble, was commissioned by flutist Paula Robison for concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur and the Caramoor Festival, and has subsequently been performed across the country. It was recorded by Miss Robison and the Charleston Symphony Orchestra and recently released on the Pergola label. A review in Fanfare (July-August 2006) described Mr. Paget’s work as “brilliant” and “expert,” and “strongly recommended” the recording. Flutist Carol Wincenc commissioned his Romania!, a work based on Romanian folk music, for her Lincoln Center debut, which she gave as winner of the prestigious Naumburg Award; the concert concluded with the work, which, according to the New York Times, “raised the audience to heaven.” Chamber music concerts at festivals in Fredericksburg, Seattle and Pennsylvania have been devoted entirely to his work. His arrangements of songs by Alec Wilder, and his own composition The Mulligan Gambol appear on the CD Dreamscape (Koch International), featuring Metropolitan Opera soprano Heidi Grant Murphy and the Aureole ensemble. Mr. Paget’s work was warmly reviewed by Opera News. Recent performances of his music in Westchester include his setting of e.e. cummings’ poem anyone lived in a pretty how town at a fund-raising concert in support of research into Parkinson’s disease.
Mr. Paget has long specialized in music of the ragtime era, which he has performed around the country and abroad, in venues ranging from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to television studios in Singapore, Sumatra and Java. His compositions and arrangements in this idiom have been featured on the EMI/Angel compact disc Silks and Rags, including a suite arranged for chamber concert band of music from Scott Joplin’s opera Treemonisha; called A Treemonisha Sampler, it was recently published by the Trillenium Music Company. His own Two Sentimental Rags have been published by Carl Fischer.
Daniel Paget is a senior professor of music at the City University of New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and has served there as chair of the Department of Art, Music and Philosophy. He has written feature articles for the Sunday edition of The New York Times and the former High Fidelity magazine, as well as extensive notes for recordings of complete sets of the Chopin Nocturnes and Mazurkas, issued by Concord., and he has been host and pre-concert lecturer for the Little Orchestra Society’s Sunset Serenatas at Lincoln Center, part of the Society’s Vivaldi’s Venice series.
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