By their metaphors ye shall know them. As we chat about the concert series at the 92nd Street Y, on upper Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, the music director Nicholas Russotto, 35, describes himself in passing as an “omnivore” and an “evangelizer”—two words that pretty much say it all.
A native of “the tobacco fields and cow pastures of Somers, Connecticut,” Russotto credits his entire career to his maternal grandmother, an amateur pianist who sat him down as a boy for his first piano lessons and introduced him to the Springfield Symphony, just over the state line in Massachusetts. At American University, in Washington, D.C., Russotto studied organ performance and business, joining 92NY as its music administrator of concerts in 2017. The current season is his second as the executive director of the department, responsible for some 60 to 80 events a year.
