On Sunday, April 20 at 3pm, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Glee Club and the Wells College Choir will present a free concert at St. Paul's Cathedral in Worcester. The men of WPI - fresh from their England tour - and the women of Wells, longtime collaborators, will join a string orchestra and soloists from the voice studio of Ruth Cooper, in performing the Schubert Mass in G major. This is the bicentennial of Schubert's birth. Also on the program are the Ave Verum Corpus and Sancta Maria of Mozart.
The female soloists at this performance will be sopranos Heidi Callahan, Dawn Ostenberg, Julie Roberts, and Jennifer Kimball. The male solos will be tenor P. Thomas Landry, and baritones Keith Strang and LeRoy Gorham. All are outstanding students at WPI, and sing in the Glee Club, Alden Voices, Chamber Choir, and Interstate 8.
The Wells College Choir, conducted by Crawford Thoburn, has performed throughout New England, and on national radio and public television. Wells has a long tradition of collaborative concerts with collegiate male choral groups, the longest standing of those with WPI. The groups have been performing together since 1974, and this is their third performance together this academic year.
Together with the WPI orchestra, they have performed four times in St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, with such works as the Mozart Requiem, The Coronation Mass and the Magnificat and Te Deum of the Belgium 20th century composer, Flor Peters.
The WPI Glee Club will be performing two of the most difficult choral works for men, The Demon of the Gibbet by Paul Hindmith - a former member of the Wells College music staff - and Tiger Tiger by Fenno Heath, on a text by William Blake. Other works of Fenno Heath are also on this program.
Paul Hindemith is one of the greatest 20th century composers. In 1940, he and his wife left Germany one step ahead of the SS, as Richard Strauss, the Director of Approved Music for the Third Reich, did not approve of Hindemith - his music avante garde. That meant that he was due for a concentration camp. He was brought to Cornell University and to Wells College. From there he went to Yale University where he wrote his only composition for the Yale Glee Club, The Demon of the Gibbet. Fenno Heath was one of his students as was Professor Curran.
This concert is the first in St. Paul's for the combined choruses of WPI and Wells. The new clerical staff of the cathedral has recently opened to doors of the newly renovated cathedral to performing groups from the greater Worcester area, especially universities. St. Paul's Cathedral is located on Chatham Street one block from the Worcester Common and Town Hall. The tall gray tower of the cathedral may be seen from campus and the bell heard on a quiet day.