Harvard, Princeton Glee Clubs

The tenors of Princeton and Harvard traded high B-flats and harmonized with a police siren last night in the annual Harvard-Princeton Football Concert. For Cambridge this is a musical ritual matched only by the semi-annual Dionysiac rites of the Gilbert and Sullivan players.

Last night Sanders Theatre was filled nearly to capacity with a pre-Game crowd of people that was just like anything you've ever read about in Salinger or F. Scott Fitzgerald. There they were: the Glee Club grads, the Princetonians up for the game, the dates of the boys on stage, all there to remind themselves how terrific it is to go to an Ivy League school. We may not be quite ready for the jet set, but are we ever the Golden Race.

Well, damn if they aren't right, in a way. There's something to be said for assembling one hundred fifty young men in white tie on a single stage and letting loose their combined vocal chords. The sound of so titanic a Mannerchor would have sent Wagner writhing in ecstasy.

Schubert loomed large in last night's concert, on as well as off the program. Princeton began the evening with five of the composer's works for male chorus. As a convinced German Romantic, I can hardly object to this choice of music sui generis; but the texture of these pieces is so consistently homophonic, and the rhythmic pattern and figuration of accompaniment so adamantly constant that even I found the novelty wearing off after a while. What makes Schubert worth listening to are the exquisite tunes of harmony with which he glides so effortlessly from one surprising key to another. But it is really unfair to ask an audience to listen to all the conventional music that surrounds those moments of genius.

The Princeton Glee Club did produce musical sound that was worth listening to. Conductor Walter Nollner, elicited a kind of breathy pianissimo that was marred only by the group's inability to produce a solid, healthy forte. Of particular note was William Martin's rich, mellifluous baritone solo in Schubert's Zur Guten Nacht; and the piano playing of the three accompanists was always sensitive and virile, if not entirely accurate.

Once the Harvard Glee Club stepped out on stage, however, the Princetonians were definitely out-classed. Under Elliott Forbes the Glee Club sang works of composers ranging from the late Renaissance Claudin de Sermisy and the mid-Baroque Dietrich Buxtehude to the sardonic child of the Twenties, Francis Poulenc. Theirs was a full-bodied sound, with the kind of focus and control that was totally absent in the Princeton group. The latter has the same basic sensitivity, but they lack the sheen and polish that make the Harvard Glee Club so irresistible in spite of everything. Both groups suffered from the chronic ills of large choruses: slipping intonation, unbalanced voices, cheating on high notes.

The second half of the concert was in a decidedly lighter vein. Princeton sang songs im Volkston from the U.S., Russia and a little town in New Jersey. With traditional libidinousness, Harvard sang Morely's Say, dear, will you not have me, The Old Maid's Song (from Pulaski County, Ky.) and Randall Thompson's Tarantella. The latter featured both a sensitive rendering of the accompaniment by Philip Kelsey and the perfect concordance of a police siren with a third-inversion F-seven chord, giving Cambridge the world's only police department with perfect pitch.

Finally, the program ended with the Princeton, Harvard and Harvard Freshmen Glee Clubs all massed on the stage. First, Princeton's Old Nassau, with its curious arm-cross-chest motion that looks like so many meaculpas; then, with a theoretical tear in each eye, Believe . . .oops . . . Fair Harvard. And as the last strains of that fine old Victorian melody faded into our collective memory, one could almost hear a little voice accompanying us into the cold night: Goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye, Columbus . . . goodbye . . .