Music Department Faculty

Susan Klebanow
Professor of Music

Office: 106 Person Hall
Email: skleb@email.unc.edu
Phone: 919-962-1093

Susan Klebanow (Professor of Music) holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Brandeis University and a Master of Music in Choral Conducting from the New England Conservatory of Music. She taught at Brandeis University before joining the Music Department faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Director of Undergraduate Studies and Chair of Choral Activities, she conducts the Carolina Choir and UNC Chamber Singers and teaches beginning and advanced courses in conducting.

Susan Klebanow received UNC's Tanner Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 1998 and a Chapman Fellowship at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities in 2003. She is currently collaborating with composer Marjorie Merryman on the commission of a choral work for the Carolina Choir. Within the last several years she has conducted new works of C. Bryan Rulon, Allen Anderson, Scott Warner and James Carlson, along with 20th-century masterworks Les Noces and Mass of Stravinsky, Friede auf Erden and Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg, and Prayers of Kierkegaard of Barber. Also devoted to period instrument performance, she is the regular guest conductor of Ensemble Courant, the Society for Performance on Original Instruments, with whom she has conducted Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Messiah, Haydn’s The Creation, and works of Bach, Telemann, Purcell, Charpentier and Mozart. Klebanow’s choirs have performed Verdi’s Requiem with the Wheeling Symphony conducted by Rachael Worby, Christopher Rouse’s Karolju and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony with the UNC Symphony conducted by Tonu Kalam, DukeEllington's Sacred Concert with the North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra, and numerous works with the North Carolina Symphony conducted by Gerhardt Zimmermann.

Susan Klebanow leads choral festivals, workshops, and clinics throughout the Southeastern United States, Mexico and Hong Kong and has served as guest conductor of many choral and instrumental ensembles, including the North Carolina Symphony, the Emmanuel Church of Boston Bach Cantata Series, Mallarme Chamber Players, Boston University’s Opera Theatre, Ensemble 27514, and the University of Veracruz Baroque Festival Chorus in Xalapa, Mexico. An accomplished soprano, she has performed extensively with contemporary music and early music groups based in Boston, North Carolina and Mexico City. With the Boston Camerata she has recorded on the Harmonia Mundi, Erato and Arista labels and she has recently appeared as soloist with the Greensboro Oratorio Society, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Community Chorus, and Mexico’s renowned Baroque ensemble, La Fontegara. She is a native of Danbury, Connecticut.