Greetings Friends of the Glee Club,
Spring semester begins today, and the Glee Club will set off at a sprint. In three weeks time, we will have our second Glee Club Presents event of the year, now fully financed by your support for which we are so grateful. What's more, we have less than four weeks to prepare for our biggest concert of the year - the
Walter L Nollner Memorial Concert - which this year focuses on British Coronations. The music is majestic - some of it very well known (Handel’s
Zadok the Priest, Parry’s
I Was Glad) and some of it more rarely heard (William Croft’s The Lord is a Sun and a Shield, which is being performed to mark the 300th anniversary of the Coronation of George I, for which it was written). It’s going to be a glorious and uplifting occasion, so we hope to see lots of you there.
Appearing on the bill that evening, for the very first time, will be the 30 members of our brand new choir in the Glee Club fold, the William Trego Singers. Named after the revered former director of the Freshman Singers, this choir has been established to serve the growing number of students at Princeton who are seeking a choral experience, and we are immensely proud of them, and of their Director Renata Dworak.
Read more about our new choir, and about Bill Trego’s wonderful legacy.
Also,
read a reflection of the year from Glee Club President, Lillian Xu '15.
Our Next Glee Club Presents Event
In keeping with our commitment to introduce our students and our community to the richest variety of vocal music possible, our upcoming Glee Club Presents event sees the grammy-winning ensemble ‘
Theatre of Voices’ visit Princeton’s campus to host a workshop and give a presentation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s masterpiece,
Stimmung - for six voices and six microphones. Composed in 1968, this work was the first major work of classical music to be based upon the creation of overtones in the voice, and it has become an immensely influential work for contemporary composers. Theatre of Voices is acknowledged to be the greatest exponent of this work, and it is a privilege to be presenting them on the eve of a performance of the same work in Carnegie Hall. Admission for this event is free, by ticket only, and since we expect demand to be extremely high please
reserve a seat as soon as possible!
Glee Club Fund Update
You did it! More than 80 alumni, past and current parents, and friends have made a contribution to the Glee Club Fund. Because of your overwhelming commitment to the Glee Club, both of our stunning Glee Club Presents concerts for this season have been fully funded, as well as an additional masterclass for our students later this year. The Glee Club Fund will truly enhance the excellence of our ensemble as well as the musical experience of being a member of the Glee Club. You have made this possible and created a new chapter for the Glee Club through your support of the Glee Club Fund. Thank you!
Record Audiences and Rousing Music
You came in unprecedented numbers to support us last semester. Our Football Concert audience was the largest the Glee Club has seen in Princeton for at least twenty years! We owe a great debt to the remarkable work of our publicity officer Katherine Wolff ’15 for this, as well as to the rest of our fabulous officers. If you missed the fun of the football concert, or if you want to revisit it, you can watch select video recordings, or view photographs and audience comments; and highlights of our unforgettable conclusion to the semester, a performance of Wynton Marsalis’s Abyssinian Mass, are also available on our website.
Looking Ahead - Reunions 2015
This year, alongside our annual performance of Tallis’s Spem in Alium in our new reunion home of Richardson Auditorium, we will be celebrating a very special anniversary. Fifty years ago this summer, a party of around a hundred students from Princeton University and Smith College embarked on a five-week tour of Europe, to perform in some of the most illustrious concert venues of Germany, Austria, Italy, The Netherlands and France. We will be hosting a special reception for those who participated in the tour and conducting a short ceremony during our reunion, concluding with a group performance of work from the 1965 tour repertoire. See more information and memories of recent reunions!
