The Harvard Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society will close their current season as a joint organization tonight with the performance of the Brahms Requicm with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This program is the culmination of the year-long labors of hundreds of students, and it manages at the same time to be one of the major musical events of Boston, for the excellence of the undergraduate group has been fully recognized.

There is no doubt that a chorus of young people, enthusiastic, and singing for the sake of singing itself is infinitely superior to an older professional group if the purely technical problems of fullness of tone and precision of performance can be overcome. The success of Mr. Woodworth in obtaining results of high professional standard from the student choir, in spite of the tremendous size of the yearly schedule, has provided this community with just such a chorus.

In the Requiem the singers face a problem quite different from any they have met in a work of major proportions in recent years. It is probably harder to perform well than either the Beethoven Missa Solemnis or the Bach St. Matthew's Passion. Though the latter are physically more difficult, they are comparatively clear-cut in their problems of nuance and phrasing. They are not particularly intimate in their sentiments; that is, there is a certain broadness about them which lends itself to interpretation by groups almost as well as by individuals. In the Requiem, however, the expression is much more intimate and personal; there must be a subtlety of nuance and phrasing which requires a degree of sympathy between the conductor and chorus far beyond that demanded by any large work which the chorus has done recently.

The Requicm has a significant position in Brahms' life since its popularity in Germany during his lifetime brought him his first wide-spread recognition. The text was compiled by Brahms himself of meditations from the Bible concerning death and the life to come. It is thoroughly Protestant in its attitude, and in spite of the melancholy and grimness of some passages and the profound nature of the work as a whole, the optimistic Protestant conception of a blessed eternity for the righteous is the essence of its spirit. The terror of the Day of Judgment is followed by the defeat of Death, and even such despair as that of the second movement, "Behold, all flesh is as the grass," gives way to rejoicing in the happy fate of "the redeemed of the Lord."

The fame of Brahms as a symphonist has some what eclipsed his accomplishments as a choral composer, but the Requiem is firmly established as one of the few choral works which will receive regular and repeated performances for many years to come.