Bradley Ellingboe
conductor
Bradley Ellingboe has led a wide-ranging career in the world of singing, including accomplishments as a choral conductor, soloist, composer, scholar, and teacher. As a choral conductor, he has led festival choruses in 35 states and 14 countries. He made his operatic conducting debut in December 2011, leading the world premiere of Stephen Paulus’s opera Shoes for the Santo Niño, in a joint production by the Santa Fe Opera and the University of New Mexico. As a bass-baritone soloist, he has sung under such conductors as Robert Shaw, Helmuth Rilling, and Sir David Willcocks. Ellingboe has more than 140 pieces of music in print, including the Requiem for chorus and orchestra, which has been performed more than 300 times in this country and Europe, and his newest work, Star Song, which had its New York debut (Lincoln Center) in May of 2014 and its European debut in July of that year. For his scholarly work in making the songs of Edvard Grieg more accessible to the English-speaking public, he was knighted by the King of Norway in 1994. As a teacher, the University of New Mexico Alumni Association named him Faculty of the Year in 2008.
Bradley Ellingboe retired in 2015 after serving on the faculty of the University of New Mexico for 30 years, where he was Director of Choral Activities, Professor of Music, and Regents Lecturer. During his three decades at UNM, he also served at various times as Chairman of the Department of Music and Coordinator of Vocal Studies. He is a graduate of Saint Olaf College and the Eastman School of Music and has done further study at the Aspen Music Festival, the Bach Aria Festival, the University of Oslo, and the Vatican.
Ellingboe has won annual awards for his choral compositions from ASCAP – the American Society of Composers, Arrangers, and Publishers – since 2000. His choral music is widely sung and is published by Oxford, G. Schirmer, Augsburg, Walton, GIA, Hal Leonard, Mark Foster, Choristers Guild, Alliance, Concordia, Selah, and particularly the Neil A. Kjos Music Company, for whom he edits two series of choral octavos. In 2017, he became Acquisitions Editor for National Music Publishing.
His music has been performed and recorded by such groups as the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, Philip Brunelle’s VocalEssence, the Saint Olaf Choir, the Harvard Glee Club, Craig Hella Johnson’s Conspirare, and the choirs of the University of Michigan and Luther College, among many others.
He has prepared choirs for such luminaries as Dave Brubeck, Moses Hogan, Alice Parker, Morten Lauridsen, René Clausen, and Robert Ray. At the request of composer Libby Larsen, the UNM Women’s Chorus, Las Cantantes, recorded all of Larsen’s music for treble chorus. He was guest conductor of the Santa Fe Desert Chorale in a series of concerts in December 2011.
