Conductor David Schelat is Director of Music at First & Central Church.  At First & Central, he creates and presents Thursday Noontime Concerts and Festival Concerts, as well as conducts the Chancel Choir and Center City Chorale (the church’s community choir). These choirs have performed in concert such masterworks as the Requiems of Fauré, Duruflé, Desenclos, and Mozart, Mozart’s Solemn Vespers of the Confessor and Coronation Mass, Handel’s Messiah, Vivaldi’s Gloria, numerous cantatas and motets of Bach, and Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb and Ceremony of Carols. Committed to new music, Mr. Schelat has led the church to commission music by Bruce Neswick, Gerald Near, and James Bassi and has conducted a number of Delaware premieres of recently compositions. In addition, he has explored a significant amount of secular and multi-cultural choral literature with both of these ensembles.

In recent years, Mr. Schelat was chosen four times from international candidate pools to be a Conducting Fellow participating in the Dennis Keene Choral Festival, where he studied conducting with Dennis Keene (Voices of Ascension), John Alexander (Pacific Chorale), Peter Bagley (University of Connecticut), and Vance George (San Francisco Symphony Chorus).  Previously, he studied conducting with Maurice Casey at The Ohio State University and Joseph Flummerfelt at Westminster Choir College.

David Schelat serves on the keyboard faculty of the Wilmington Music School, and is coordinator for the Vernon deTar Scholarship Competition, a competition for young organists. He is a member of the American Guild of Organists, the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, Chorus America, the American Choral Directors Association, and the Presbyterian Association of Musicians.  He has served on the national board of this organization and was Conference Director of PAM’s 2000 Westminster Conference on Worship and Music. He served on the Delaware State Arts Council for 6 years, and, in 2005, won a Wilmington Award for his longstanding arts leadership in the city of Wilmington.

Mr. Schelat composes on commission; his music appears in the catalogues of Oxford University Press, Augsburg-Fortress, and MorningStar Music.