Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses

Friday night's concert by the Harvard and Radcliffe Choral Groups was their best of the year. For a program divided between madrigals and modern works, G. Wallace Woodworth used only the small choruses from each group, numbering around 60. The reduction in quantity of singers brought about a sizable improvement in tonal quality, especially in the delicate madrigals.

The greatness of these 350-year-old madrigals lies in the combination of lovely Elizabethan poetry and musical settings which preserve a consistent harmonic structure while observing equality of line. Each part, from soprano to bass, is melodic and fun to sing. Woodworth has long spoken of madrigals as after-dinner music, and on Friday he proved his point by placing his 16 best singers around a table for several of the pieces. Morley's My Bonny Lass and Shoot, False Love sounded especially buoyant in this arrangement.

The small chorus wasn't so effective for madrigals as the infinitesimal chorus, but it still was very good. The singers were more carefully trained than in their earlier concerts; the tone was seldom forced, and the diction was marvellous. I could understand almost every word, even in the contrapuntal sections. By itself the Radcliffe Choral Society sang three madrigals very well indeed. The best of these was Four Arms, Two Necks, One Wreathing by Weelkes. In some of the madrigals, however, Woodworth conducted with too much rubato. In this music the note values always slow down when the text demands it; the beat of the conductor need never do the job of the composer.

The modern half of the program featured the first performance of Karl Kohn's A Latin Fable, for male chorus and piano four-hands. The fable concerns the ass who put on a lion's skin, but Kohn set it rather didactically, giving humor no place. His music was astringent and powerful, and was probably more rewarding to listen to than to sing.

Welcoming the Radcliffe singers back, the Glee Club sang Two Odes of Horace with a truly gorgeous tone. Composer Randall Thompson is a well-known expert at choral writing, and when his music is sung well the result is memorable. The concert closed with Trois Chansons by Ravel. These are a kind of musical sandwich, with a lovely lyrical piece between two witty, ironic and bitter-sweet choral songs. The performances were again excellent. If Woodworth can train his full choruses as well as he has trained the smaller groups, audiences will really have to sit up this spring and summer.