Betsy Burleigh is celebrating her fourth season as Music Director of the 101-year-old Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, which includes leading the Mendelssohn in its own concert productions as well as preparing the choir to sing with the Pittsburgh Symphony.  Most recently she conducted the group in a critically acclaimed performance of Rachmaninoff’s Vespers in Pittsburgh and took the Mendelssohn Chamber Singers, a select sub-group of 32, to sing on the Library of Congress concert series in Washington D.C.

          This year Ms. Burleigh is making her debut as Music Director of Boston’s Chorus pro Musica, which premiered Poulenc’s Gloria with the Boston Symphony and sang America’s first performances of Britten’s War Requiem.  She served as Assistant Director of Choruses for The Cleveland Orchestra from 1998 until 2009, and for five years was the Chorus Master for Cleveland Opera.  She is on leave from her position of Coordinator of Choral and Vocal Music at Cleveland State University.

          Ms. Burleigh is an active conductor, and has led the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Akron Symphony, and the Canton Symphony Orchestras in the choral/orchestral repertoire.  Musical theater engagements have included the music direction of Viktor Ullman’s opera Der Kaiser von Atlantis with Cleveland Public Theater, which received the 2000 Northern Ohio Live Achievement Award for best classical/opera performance.  She also led critically acclaimed Opera Cleveland performances of A Little Night Music.  Further credits include conducting the Cleveland Orchestra Chorus on an Emmy award-winning benefit concert for the 9/11 Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.  Active as a guest conductor of choral festivals and workshops, she most recently led Cincinnati’s October Festival Choir in Haydn’s Theresienmesse.

          Ms. Burleigh has prepared choruses for Manfred Honeck, Rafael Frubeck de Burgos, Jan Pascal Tortelier, Leonard Slatkin, Sir Andrew Davis, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Anton Coppola, Jane Glover, Jahja Ling, Nicholas McGegan, JohnNelson, Yuri Temirkanov, and Franz Welser-Most, among others.

          Her career began in Boston, where she was Music Director of The Master Singers, the Longy Chamber Singers, the Cambridge Madrigal Singers, and held teaching positions at Tufts University, Clark University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She holds a master’s degree in choral conducting from New England Conservatory and a doctorate from Indiana University.