Word: glees
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Choice of the group for "worst featured artist" was the Harvard Glee Club-Radcliffe Choral Society, for its performance of the Bach St. Matthew Passion...
Friday night's performance by the Harvard Glee Club and Radcliffe Choral Society, led by Elliot Forbes, surmounted the considerable technical difficulties of the work, but threatened to break upon the Scylla of a capella singing, intonation. The intra-chorus work was satisfactory, with the exception of several bewildering opening bars of various sections; but as each part went on, the chorus, depressed by a rather cowardly soprano section, sank lower and lower, and at the end of the second movement was grovelling around a third lower than was written, producing the weird impression of a record being played...
...most recent large-scale work, a Requiem for double chorus, which will be performed tonight in Sanders by the Glee Club and Choral Society, was composed in isolation. "I had a sabbatical in 1957-8 and my friends assumed that I had left town for the winter. Really, I had just stayed at home on Brattle Street working long hours in my studio there. When I appeared at school next fall, some colleagues asked me how I had enjoyed my trip. The solitude that I attained in that year was invaluable. After two months of undisturbed labor, I found that...
Despite an historically inaccurate interpretation by Charles Munch, Bach's St. Matthew Passion received a generally good performance yesterday from the Boston Symphony Orchestra, five soloists, the Harvard Glee Club, and the Radcliffe Choral Society. In most places not up to the exacting standards set by Hermann Scherchen on Westminster records, Mr. Munch's rendition was marred seriously by his treatment of Bach as Verdi, and by the unfortunate deletion of many beautiful arias and chorales. He also cut parts of reciatatives, which are essential to the full meaning of the story of the Passion and of the work...
...most consistently good music-making of the performance was the singing provided by the Glee Club and the Choral Society. Their entrances were crisp, their diction clear (including every umlaut), and their pitch perfect. Their dramatic "Barabbam" at the turning point of the drama was frightening, although Mr. Munch spoiled part of its effect by having the organist hold the chord for ten seconds--perhaps the longest quarter note in history...