Pomona College Glee Club in Concert
Free
Will Todd — Selected works
Paul Mealor — Selected works
Heinrich Schütz — Selected works
Johann Christoph Bach — Selected works
Shawn Kirchner — Selected works
George Frideric Handel — Dixit Dominus, HWV 232
Pomona College's celebrated chamber choir—The Pomona College Glee Club, under the leadership of Donna M. Di Grazia—comes to Berkeley and Palo Alto (California), Portland (Oregon) and Seattle (Washington) from Claremont, CA for their 2024 concert tour. The Glee Club boasts a membership of 24 singers who passed a rigorous audition evaluating their individual strengths in singing and sight reading, their abilities to learn a great deal of music quickly, and their readiness to work within a small ensemble, where blend and musical sensitivity are essential. The ensemble will present a bouquet of unaccompanied music by Williametta Spencer, Will Todd, Paul Mealor, Heinrich Schütz, Johann Christoph Bach, and Shawn Kirchner, as well as Handel's magnificent Dixit Dominus, performed with student soloists and Harmonologia Pomona, a professional period instrument ensemble.
All the concerts are free of charge, no tickets required. The public is welcome.
About Pomona College Glee Club
The Glee Club is Pomona's advanced choral ensemble; among its most distinguished alumni are 14-time Grammy-winner Robert Shaw (class of 1938), the most influential choral conductor in the Twentieth Century, and Howard Swan (class of 1928), revered in the field as the dean of choral music education in the United States. Each spring semester, up to 32 of the Claremont Colleges' most gifted singers, with majors drawn from across the natural and physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts, come together to explore a challenging classical repertoire from the 16th Century to the present, focusing especially on works for unaccompanied voices.
https://www.pomona.edu/choral/glee-clubAbout Pomona College Glee Club
The Glee Club is Pomona’s advanced choral ensemble; among its most distinguished alumni are 14-time Grammy® winner Robert Shaw (class of 1938), the most influential choral conductor in the twentieth century, and Howard Swan (class of 1928), revered in the field as the dean of choral music education in the United States. Each spring semester, up to 32 of the Claremont Colleges’ most gifted singers, with majors drawn from across the natural and physical sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities and arts, come together to explore a challenging classical repertoire from the 16th century to the present, focusing especially on works for unaccompanied voices.
Selected as a finalist for the 2017–18 American Prize in choral performance (university/college division) based on performances from the 2013–17 ensembles, the Glee Club has performed a wide variety of extended works, including Bach’s Christ lag ist Todesbanden, Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli and Brahms’s Liebeslieder Walzer, as well as many shorter works by composers from across the centuries and today, including Eric Whitacre, Morten Lauridsen, Shawn Kirchner, Moses Hogan and Marques L. A. Garrett. It was also honored to offer the premieres of Tom Flaherty’s A Timbered Choir (2001) and Shakespeare Sonnets (2004), and to be included in the exhibition “Noyses, sounds, and sweet aires”: Music in Early Modern England at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. (2006).
The Glee Club rehearses from January through April in preparation for a series of on- and off-campus concerts, and for its annual tour immediately following Commencement. International destinations have included Florence, Venice, Rome, London, Cambridge, Durham, Edinburgh, Kraków, Wrocław, Leipzig, Dresden, and Prague; frequent domestic travel has included New York, Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Seattle, the San Francisco Bay Area, and Washington, D.C. The group has sung by invitation at St. Peter’s Basilica (Rome), St. Mark’s Basilica (Venice), Trinity College Chapel (Cambridge), St. Giles Cathedral (Edinburgh), Grace Cathedral (San Francisco), the Thomaskirche (Leipzig), the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (St. Louis), and the National Cathedral (Washington, D.C.).
To hear a sample of past ensembles, please visit pomona.edu/choral/glee-club.
https://www.pomona.edu/choral/glee-club