The Choral Arts Collective

Welborn E. Young

Welborn E. Young is Director of Choral Activities and Professor of Music at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is a guest conductor of honor choirs and is a clinician in festivals and clinics throughout the United States. His choirs have performed at state, regional and national conferences and have toured in Europe performing in such cities as Florence, Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Cambridge, York, and London. He has been a featured festival conductor at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Netherlands, at the York Minster International Choral Festival in Great Britain, and at Carnegie Hall. Dr. Young has presented at regional, national and international conferences of the American Choral Directors Association, the Annual International Conference on Humanities and Arts in a Global World in Athens, Greece, and the Hawaii International Conference on Arts and Humanities.

Welborn Young has been the Artistic Director and Conductor of Bel Canto Company since 2005. Critics describe his work as “inspired,” “glorious, precision-honed,” and “exquisite.” With Bel Canto he regularly conducts a variety of music ranging from large choral-orchestral works such as Bach’s St. John Passion and Richard Einhorn’s Voices of Light: The Passion of Joan of Arc to intimate a cappella works.

Under his direction, Bel Canto was featured on National Public Radio’s Performance Today, has been the featured ensemble for Hinshaw Music’s national Celebration conference, performed at Southern Regional and State ACDA conferences, and is a frequent performer at regional concert series. The release of four CDs highlight live performances of Bel Canto’s work: Radiance; Rejoice and Be Merry; American Perspectives; and Requiem for the Living, the first recording of this work by Dan Forrest.

For seven years, 2000-2007, he served as the conductor of the Choral Society of Greensboro in performances of significant choral-orchestral works. Dr. Young holds the DMA in Choral Conducting from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.