Music Staff

 

Kent TritleKENT TRITLE, Director of Music

Kent Tritle is one of America’s leading choral conductors.  He is founder and Music Director of Sacred Music in a Sacred Space, the acclaimed concert series entering its 21st season at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City; Music Director of the Oratorio Society of New York and of Musica Sacra; Director of Choral Activities at the Manhattan School of Music; and a member of the graduate faculty of The Juilliard School.  An acclaimed organ virtuoso, he is also the organist of the New York Philharmonic.

In more than 120 concerts presented by the Sacred Music in a Sacred Space series, Kent Tritle has conducted the Choir and Orchestra of St. Ignatius Loyola in a broad repertoire of sacred works, from Renaissance masses and oratorio masterworks to premieres by notable living composers.  During the 2009-2010 season, Mr. Tritle will conduct the U.S. premieres of John Taverner’s Requiem and Valentin Silvestrov’s Diptychon, as well as works by Bach, Handel, Howells, Mozart, Martin, Monteverdi, Pärt, Pinkham, Purcell, Rachmaninov, Steffani and Stravinsky. Last season, Mr. Tritle and the choir performed Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 as part of the city-wide Bernstein: The Best of All Possible Worlds festival, gave the U.S. premiere performance of Gavin Bryars’ On Photography and performed live in the opening festival of radio station WNYC’s new Jerome L. Greene Performance Space, on a concert bill with René Pape, John Zorn, Ute Lemper, and Nico Muhly. 

As Director of Music Ministries at St. Ignatius Loyola, Mr. Tritle oversees a program that annually produces more than 400 services with music. Since his appointment there in 1989, he has led the church’s professional choir to critical acclaim and developed the 50-voice volunteer Parish Community Choir.

Kent Tritle will in 2009-2010 mark his fifth season as Music Director of the Oratorio Society of New York, New York City’s acclaimed 200 voice volunteer chorus. In addition to leading the Society’s annual Messiah performances at Carnegie Hall, he has conducted repertoire such as Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem and Tragic Overture, Paul Moravec’s Songs of Love and War, and the Fauré Requiem. The Oratorio Society recently joined the Juilliard Orchestra in a performance of Bernstein’s Symphony No. 3, “Kaddish,” conducted by Alan Gilbert, part of the Bernstein: The Best of all Possible Worlds festival sponsored by the New York Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall.

In February 2008 Mr. Tritle was appointed Music Director of Musica Sacra, New York’s premier presenter of sacred music performed by a professional chorus in concert halls. Recent concerts have included Scarlatti’s Stabat Mater with J.S. Bach’s Cantata 82 “Ich habe genug” and motets Komm, Jesu komm and Singet dem Herrn at the newly renovated Alice Tully Hall; a program of works by Arvo Pärt and Morton Feldman for a WNYC New Sounds Live concert; Bach’s Mass in B Minor and the annual performances of Handel’s Messiah at Carnegie Hall; performances of Bach’s St. John Passion, Orff’s Carmina Burana with a world premiere by Alessandro Cadario, and a program of Schubert, Mahler and the Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem at the Rose Theater, home of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Kent Tritle is renowned as a master clinician, giving workshops on conducting and repertoire.  In 2009-2010 he will give a master class in oratorio at the Metropolitan Opera Guild, as well as master classes in Handel’s Messiah at the Mannes College and in conducting at the Cincinnati chapter of the American Guild of Organists.

From 1996 to 2004, Mr. Tritle was Music Director of the Emmy-nominated Dessoff Choirs, winners of the ASCAP/Chorus America award for adventurous programming of contemporary music. Under his direction the Dessoff Choirs performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, American Symphony Orchestra, and Czech Philharmonic, as well as in many performances of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival, including a nationally telecast Live from Lincoln Center concert of Mozart’s Requiem.

Mr. Tritle has prepared choruses for conductors Christoph von Dohnányi, Leonard Slatkin, Michael Tilson Thomas, Robert Spano, Gerard Schwarz, Vladimir Spivakov, Nicholas McGegan, Leon Botstein, and Dennis Russell Davies. Among the soloists with whom he has collaborated are singers Renée Fleming, Jessye Norman, Hei-Kyung Hong, Marilyn Horne, Susanne Mentzer, Susan Graham, and Sherrill Milnes; cellist Yo-Yo Ma; pianist André Previn; and actor Tony Randall.

As organist of the New York Philharmonic, Mr. Tritle was recently the soloist in performances of Saint-Saëns’ “Organ” Symphony both at Avery Fisher Hall and in Vail, Colorado. He has appeared often as a guest artist with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. As an organ recitalist he performs regularly in Europe and across the United States; recital venues have included the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Zurich Tonhalle, the Church of St. Sulpice in Paris, King’s College at Cambridge, and Westminster Abbey.  With the Philharmonic he has recorded Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem, Britten’s War Requiem and Henze’s Symphony No. 9, all conducted by Kurt Masur, as well as the Grammy-nominated Sweeney Todd conducted by Andrew Litton. He is featured on the DVD The Organistas and Creating the Stradivarius of Organs.

At the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, Kent Tritle was artistic consultant on the design and installation of the four-manual, 68-stop mechanical action organ, which was dedicated in 1993. This instrument again drew national attention in July 2007 in a program of organ concertos for the American Guild of Organists conducted by Mr. Tritle, with corresponding critical success.

Kent Tritle has made more than a dozen recordings on the Telarc, AMDG, Epiphany, Gothic, VAI and MSR Classics labels. His most recent CD with the Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola of Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir and Ginastera’s Lamentations of Jeremiah, has been praised by Gramophone and Audiophile Audition and received a four star rating in BBC Music Magazine.

Mr. Tritle holds graduate and undergraduate degrees from The Juilliard School in organ performance and choral conducting and has been on the Juilliard faculty since 1996, currently directing a graduate practicum on oratorio in collaboration with the school’s Vocal Arts Department, and teaching choral conducting. He has been a featured personality on ABC World News Tonight, National Public Radio, and Minnesota Public Radio, as well as in The New York Times and numerous other radio and print outlets.

For more information, sound clips, and updated concert information, visit http://www.kenttritle.com.



Nancianne Parrella NANCIANNE PARRELLA, Associate Organist

Nancianne Parrella is Associate Organist of the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola, where she works closely with director Kent Tritle in the Church’s extensive liturgical music program and is featured frequently on the concert series, Sacred Music in a Sacred Space. During the 2009-2010 season she will be organist for the November 11 SMSS concert and she will play a pre-concert recital of organ works of Purcell, Howells, and Eben. Later in the season, she will again headline an Organ Plus! recital with Arthur Fiacco, cello; Victoria Drake, harp; and Jorge Avila, violin.

Ms. Parrella’s signature Organ Plus! recitals, which demonstrate the versatility of the organ with various combinations of instruments, have become audience favorites. In addition to performances at St. Ignatius Loyola, she has brought Organ Plus! to the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart, Newark, NJ; New York’s Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church; Calvary Church, Summit, NJ; and at St. Agnes Cathedral, Rockville Center, NY. Ms. Parrella has also been featured with Mr. Fiacco at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival Organ Series in Charleston, SC.

Continuing her active performance career, in the spring of 2009, Nancianne Parrella was one of two organists with the New York Philharmonic for Music Director Lorin Maazel’s farewell concerts of the Britten War Requiem, and in July she performed on the prestigious Methuen Memorial Music Hall 2009 Organ Recital Series in Massachusetts.

In the summer of 2008, the first Gettysburg Festival in Pennsylvania invited Nancianne Parrella to be Artistic Director of the Interlude Concerts, a chamber music series based on the popular intermezzo series she introduced to the Spoleto Festival USA in the 1970s. During the 2008-2009 season she performed recitals at All Saint’ Episcopal Church, Fort Worth, Texas, and at the Princeton University Chapel. She was part of the American Guild of Organists’ celebration of the International Year of the Organ, both in New York City and as soloist with the University of Massachusetts Amherst Symphony Orchestra, where she performed the Poulenc Concerto for Organ, Strings, and Timpani and Stephen Paulus’s Concerto for Organ, Timpani, Percussion, and Strings.

In 2007, Ms Parrella performed the Paulus concerto for the New York City Regional Convention of the AGO. Other notable recent performances have been with both Musica Sacra and the Oratorio Society of New York conducted by Kent Tritle; with Voices of Ascension under Dennis Keene; with the Choir of Trinity Church, Wall Street; and with the women’s ensemble AMUSE. At Spoleto Festival USA, she played the Poulenc Concerto and Julian Wachner’s Cymbale, of which the Charleston Post and Courier reported that “…Nancianne Parrella as featured soloist took charge of Mr. Wachner’s vigorous complexity with gusto and aggressive control.”

Among America’s preeminent choral accompanists, Nancianne Parrella is an Emeritus Faculty member of Westminster Choir College of Rider University, Princeton, NJ, where she was accompanist and assistant director of the famed Westminster Choir and Symphonic Choir, directed by Joseph Flummerfelt. She toured and recorded extensively with Westminster Choir and can be heard on their most recent CD Heaven to Earth, released by AVIE.

Ms. Parrella was long associated with America’s pioneering choral conductor, Robert Shaw, with whom she toured and recorded in the U.S., France, and Brazil. She has also collaborated with noted conductors: Kurt Masur, Charles Dutoit, Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic; Wolfgang Sawallisch and The Philadelphia Orchestra; Zdenek Macal and Neeme Järvi and the New Jersey Symphony; and James Bagwell and Louis Langreé in New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival.

Previous church music collaborations include with Frederick Grimes at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, New York City, and its Bach Vespers, and with John Bertalot at Trinity Church, Princeton, NJ. She was also for many seasons organist for the Bethlehem Bach Festival, directed by Greg Funfgeld, and co-director with William Trego of the renowned Princeton High School Choir.

Nancianne Parrella has recorded on the MSR, AMDG, AVIE, Chesky, Delos, Gothic, Dorian, Telarc and Teldec labels. The American Organist magazine hailed her CD Les Corps Glorieux, performed with cellist Arthur Fiacco and harpist Victoria Drake as one that “…exudes a spirit of lovely serenity...,” and her Jubilations, recorded with St. Ignatius Brass as “…sweeping, dramatic and awe inspiring…” She is featured in two remarkable DVDs: The Organistas and Creating the Stradivarius of Organs, which reveal the development of the King of Instruments and the design and installation of the N.P. Mander Organ at St. Ignatius Loyola, both released by Pheasant Eye Productions.


reneRENEE ANNE LOUPRETTE, Associate Director of Music

Hailed by The New York Times as “a technically nimble and dynamic organist,” Renée Anne Louprette has established an international career as organ recitalist and choral conductor. For the past four years she has been the Associate Director of Music at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City, where she collaborates with Music Director Kent Tritle in the direction of the renowned music ministry program serving as liturgical organist, accompanist and conductor of both professional and amateur ensembles. Contributor to the artistic direction of the acclaimed Sacred Music in a Sacred Space concert series, she directs the N.P. Mander Organ Recital Series and performs regularly as conductor, recitalist and continuo player. She previously served as Director of Music and Organist at the Church of St. Ann in Avon, Connecticut, and the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Montclair, New Jersey.

Ms. Louprette was appointed in 2007 to the faculty of the John J. Cali School of Music, Montclair State University in New Jersey as Visiting Specialist in Organ, where she oversees a growing class of young organists and has established a new organ recital series. As recitalist, she has appeared at the festivals of Dún Laoghaire, Ireland; Magadino, Switzerland; In Tempore Organi, Italy; Ghent and Hasselt, Belgium; and Toulouse Les Orgues, France. She was a featured artist in the 2007 Region II Convention of the American Guild of Organists in New York City in a celebrated performance of Poulenc’s Organ Concerto. She has performed throughout the UK and Ireland including recitals at Westminster Abbey, the Temple Church and St. Bride’s Church, London, St. Giles Cathedral Edinburgh and Dunblane Cathedral, Scotland, and Galway Cathedral, Ireland. The Irish Times described her as “a communicative player with no shortage of imaginative ideas, with fingers fully capable of backing them up.” In September 2009, she will appear as organ soloist with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in Brisbane, Australia, in Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony under the direction of her husband, French conductor Emmanuel Plasson. She has been invited to perform along with English virtuoso David Briggs in the closing event of the 2010 National Convention of the American Guild of Organists at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

Ms. Louprette has collaborated with a number of New York City ensembles including the Clarion Music Society, American Symphony Orchestra, the Dessoff Choirs, Gotham City Orchestra, Oratorio Society of New York, Cantori New York, Orchestra of Our Time and Piffaro, appearing in Carnegie, Avery Fisher and Merkin Halls and the Miller Theatre of Columbia University. She has performed with l’Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse under the direction of Richard Hickox, the Musica Nova and Antiphona ensembles of Toulouse and Orchestra New England. European accompanying engagements included performances in Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, and the festival Éclats de Voix in Auch, France. She is a member of the keyboard trio TRIPTYCH which performs original compositions for piano, organ and harpsichord by Canadian composer Paul Halley.

Renée Anne Louprette has been featured in two documentary films by producer Bert Shapiro: “Creating the Stradivarius of Organs” (2007), and “Faces in the Crowd” (2009) featuring performing artists from the New York Metropolitan area. She has recorded music of Olivier Messiaen at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford, Connecticut, and her début recording of French organ music on the N.P. Mander Organ of St. Ignatius Loyola will be released on the MSR Classics label in 2009.

Renée Anne Louprette holds a Bachelor of Music degree summa cum laude in piano performance and a Graduate Professional Diploma in organ performance from the Hartt School of Music, University of Hartford, where she began organ studies in 1993 with Larry Allen. She pursued private studies with Dame Gillian Weir in London and with James David Christie. She earned a Premier Prix - mention très bien, in 2003 from the Conservatoire National de Région de Toulouse, France, under the guidance of Michel Bouvard, Jan Willem Jansen and Philippe Lefebvre. In 2005, she won a Diplôme Supérieur in organ performance from the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Musique et de Danse de Toulouse. She is a member of the Executive Board of the New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists and previously served as Dean of the Greater Harford, Connecticut Chapter AGO.



Robert ReuterROBERT REUTER, Associate Musician

Robert Reuter, choral director, singer, pianist, and organist, currently serves as Associate Musician at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City.  He works with nearly all of the choirs and musicians in providing music for many liturgies throughout the year.  Mr. Reuter is director of music for the 11:00 Wallace Hall Mass and 7:30 Sunday evening Mass, preparing and directing the Wallace Hall and Canticum Sacrum choirs.  He also co-directs the 50-member Parish Community Choir with Kent Tritle, Nancianne Parrella and Renée Anne Louprette.  As a singer, Mr. Reuter has experience performing a variety of music genres including opera, choral, and musical theater.  He has sung with numerous choral groups on the west and east coasts, including the critically acclaimed Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola.  In addition to his directing and singing roles, Mr. Reuter is thrilled to serve as accompanist for the three St. Ignatius Children’s Choirs, under the direction of Mary Huff.

A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Reuter was choir director, accompanist and cantor at St. Martin of Tours Roman Catholic Parish in San José, California for seven years.  For six years, he accompanied the Santa Clara University Mission Choir in Santa Clara, California.  He began his involvement in music ministry at a young age, and is an alumni of Music Ministry Alive!, a summer school and festival for liturgical musicians founded and directed by composer David Haas. 

Mr. Reuter holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Music from Santa Clara University.  He joined the music staff at St. Ignatius Loyola in 2007.



Mary HuffMARY HUFF, Director of Children’s Choirs

Mary Huff, a native of Greenville, SC, is Director of Children’s Choirs at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York City, where she conducts and administers the four graded choirs for over 100 children in grades one through eight. She graduated cum laude from Furman University in 1999, and continued her musical studies on full scholarship at the Yale University Institute of Sacred Music where she earned a Master of Music degree in 2001. She continued further post-graduate studies in music education with Lynnel Joy Jenkins at Westminster Choir College specializing the training of children’s choirs. Mary has held positions as an organist and choral conductor in churches in South Carolina, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York. She has taught music to children of all grade levels (K-12) in Catholic, independent, and inner-city schools. She also serves as Associate Director of Music at Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. Mary and her husband, Canadian organist Andrew Henderson, have two sons, Elliot and Christian.



ERIN ACHESON, Music Administrator came to St. Ignatius Loyola in June 2005 from Columbia Artists Management LLC. At CAMI she was Managerial Assistant to Vice President/Artist Manager Mary Jo Connealy, working with artists such as Vladimir Spivakov, Christian Zacharias, Claude Frank, Valentina Lisitsa & Alexei Kuznetsoff, Katia and Marielle Labèque, Rudolf Buchbinder, and the Empire Brass.  Prior to her work with CAMI, she held the position of Managing Director at the S.E.M. Ensemble in Brooklyn.  Erin graduated summa cum laude from Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA, with a Bachelor of Music degree in French horn and vocal performance.  Upon graduation, she was accepted into the internship program at The Juilliard School where she worked in the orchestra library for the 1998-1999 season.