Richard Westenburg, who died yesterday at 76, was founding director of Musica Sacra, the professional choral society whose annual Carnegie Hall performance of Handel’s “Messiah” was a highlight of New York’s winter holiday scene.

Often conducting from his harpsichord in the center of his group, Westenburg cut a dramatic figure while leading 34 singers and 27 instrumentalists through their paces.

“They do not sing self-consciously down to their audience, nor do they fear an arrest from the fashion police,” wrote The New York Sun’s music critic of a performance shortly before Christmas in 2003. “I only wish we didn’t have to wait another whole year to enjoy it again.”

Westenburg founded the Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra in 1964, when he was music director at the Central Presbyterian Church on Park Avenue. It was, the chorus says, the first all-professional paid admission series ever undertaken by a church.

By the early 1970s, Musica Sacra’s concerts moved on to larger venues, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Carnegie Hall. As its Latin name suggests, the chorus included in its repertoire much ancient church music, including chant of Hildegard, settings of Bach, and Christmas carols. But it also ranged to modern compositions by Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, and Meredith Monk.

Westenburg initiated Musica Sacra’s Basically Bach Festival, which ran from 1979–89 and was revived in 2006. Under his baton, the group recorded works for RCA, BMG, and Deutsche Gramophone, including the first complete all-digital “Messiah,” in 1981. He recently founded his own label, Bravo Recordings.

Born April 26, 1932, in Minneapolis, Westenburg trained as a pianist and later as an organist. He studied with Pierre Cochereau and Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and later studied sacred music at Union Theological Seminary. In 1974, he left Central Presbyterian to become music director at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and in 1990 moved to the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church. He also held teaching positions at the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, and elsewhere.

Each year, Westenburg wrote his own program notes for the Musica Sacra “Messiah” performance, and the notes for 2003 included a letter he’d written to his musicians in 1974:

“I can remember as a high school boy certain things that really moved me; many were through some of those passages [in ‘Messiah’] of tragic poignancy, and tears would come to my eyes, because they spoke to me the truths of man’s inhumanity; or I could think about passages of simple, unadorned, direct, honest joy, and I would know that Handel’s overall plan for expressing reconciliation represented a triumph the striving for which was not futile … it reminds me that the survival of worthwhile things can happen; and that Handel’s ‘Messiah’ helped it happen in me.”

Westenburg is survived by four children, Eric Westenburg, Kirsten Westenburg Barnhorst, Mario Westenburg, and Nadia Westenburg, and seven grandchildren from two marriages.