MUSIC DIRECTOR
STEVEN LIPSITT
HERITAGE CHORALE
Music Director and Conductor, 2020 -
In addition to his work with the Heritage Chorale, Steven Lipsitt currently serves as founding music director of the Bach, Beethoven, & Brahms Society and conductor of The Apollo Club (Boston’s oldest men’s chorus). He has served as director of choruses at Boston University, director of choral & orchestral activity at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, conductor of the Yale Russian Chorus and the Yale Freshman Glee Club, and director of the Springfield Symphony Chorus. He has prepared symphonic choruses for Robert Shaw, Leonard Slatkin, Seiji Ozawa, and Michael Tilson Thomas, and has guest conducted Emmanuel Music, the Phoenix Bach Choir, and the New Haven Chorale. Choruses under his direction have appeared at Symphony Hall, Jordan Hall, Tanglewood, and Carnegie Hall. He has collaborated with folk, pop, and jazz artists Bill Crofut, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Bobby McFerrin, Odetta, the Klezmatics, and Deborah Henson-Conant.
In opera and musical theatre, Steven has worked with English National Opera, Scottish Opera, Washington Opera, the Opera Company of Boston, Boston Lyric Opera, and the Boston Music Theatre Project; with directors Robert Carsen, Gerald Gutierrez, and James Hammerstein; and with choreographers Peter Martins and Daniel Pelzig. He led twenty performances of Carousel at the Kennedy Center Opera House with actors Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, and John Spencer. He also served as guest conductor for the Boston Pops and Boston Ballet, as well as the New England Conservatory Orchestras, Boston Conservatory Opera Theatre, and Opera-at-Longy.
Steven holds the only double-major master’s degree in choral & orchestral conducting ever awarded by the Yale School of Music, where he won awards for exceptional promise and excellence in choral conducting. He studied clarinet with the BSO’s Pasquale Cardillo and Yale’s Keith Wilson, voice with Joan Heller and Phyllis Curtin, composition with Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick, and improvisation with John Mehegan. His work has twice been recognized in The Boston Globe’s year-end wrap-up as “the best” of Boston’s musical offerings. He won first prize in the inaugural “Dimitri Mitropoulos” International Conducting Competition in Athens in 1996, and has conducted orchestras and choirs in the US and Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, South America, and Asia.