Spotlight | Chorus Director

Betsy Burleigh

Betsy Burleigh comes to the Kansas City Symphony with over 20 years of experience preparing choruses to sing with major American orchestras. She began as Assistant Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra Chorus, preparing the singers for all performances at the Blossom Festival. She later became conductor of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, preparing all choral works for the Pittsburgh Symphony as well as conducting independent concerts. Burleigh has also prepared concerts for the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood, in Symphony Hall, and most recently for the 2025 Holiday Pops concerts with Keith Lockhart. Further credits include preparing the Cincinnati May Festival Chorus for performances with the Cincinnati Pops at the World Choir Games in 2012. This April she prepared the Kansas City Symphony Chorus to sing Rachmaninoff’s Spring and Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream under the direction of Matthias Pintscher.

Burleigh is no stranger to the podium herself. As Musical Director of the Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh, she conducted performances of Brahms’ Requiem, Bach’s B Minor Mass, Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, and Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor. Her Chorus pro Musica (Boston) performance of Haydn’s Creation was praised as an “expansive, poetic reading” (The Boston Globe) and her rendition of Orff’s Carmina Burana was called both “nuanced” and “hair-raising” (The Boston Musical Intelligencer). As a guest conductor, Burleigh has led concerts with the Pittsburgh Symphony, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Akron Symphony, the Berkshire Choral Society, and the Cathedral Choral Society (Washington D.C.).

Burleigh also served as Chorus Master for Cleveland Opera, preparing performances of Carmen, Turandot, Eugene Onegin, Roméo et Juliette, Sweeney Todd, Iolanthe, and conducting Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. She won the 2000 Northern Ohio Live Achievement Award for best classical/opera performance as the Music Director for Ulmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis.

Currently, Burleigh is the Thomas R. Kasdorf Professor of Choral Conducting at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, where she trained choruses and conducted performances of Britten’s War Requiem, Orff’s Carmina Burana, Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony, Poulenc’s Gloria, Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast, Haydn’s The Seasons, Dett’s The Ordering of Moses, Dvorak’s Mass in D, and Handel’s Messiah. She served as Chair of the Choral Conducting Department from 2013 to 2024. She is thrilled to be back in the professional orchestra world, working with the Kansas City Symphony, Matthias Pintscher, and the Kansas City Symphony Chorus.