UNT professor Richard DeRosa takes prestigious conducting, arrangement assignments

Richard DeRosa, jazz composition and arranging professor, has won several prestigious assignments.

He will serve as chief conductor of the WDR Big Band, a German government-supported organization in Cologne, for the 2014-16 season.

In New York City, DeRosa contributed his arrangement of "Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea" for the Broadway show After Midnight. And he arranged seven Stephen Sondheim compositions with a jazz flair for A Bed and a Chair: A New York Love Story, a show featuring four vocalists including actress-singer Bernadette Peters, with the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra that premiered at City Center last fall.

"It was wonderful to hear these outstanding singers perform with the arrangements," DeRosa says. "Stephen Sondheim was pleased and impressed, so that was even more gratifying."

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