Presenting an ambitious offering of sacred and profane music, the Harvard Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society over-extended themselves last night in a program that was often interesting, but, in toto, musically unsatisfying. The performances of music ranging from sixteenth century Palestrina and Gabrieli to a Hindemith setting of Walt Whitman continually emphasized text and style at the expense of sound, and the intricacies of the complex part singing were never fully realized by renditions not quite up to Harvard-Radcliffe standards.

The two opening Palestrina works, a Sanctus for high and a Supplicationes for low voices were, perhaps, the best of the sacred offerings. The Radcliffe group has mellowed in the past year, although an absence of really first-rate soprano voices is still evident in the lovely Sanctus. Singing the Supplicationes with fine balance and diction, the low voices sacrificed some precision as Professor Woodworth wisely kept to the earnest simplicity of this work.

Palestrina's exceedingly difficult Stabat Mater for 24 mixed voices, probably beyond the capabilities of the available performers, suffered from the apparently unquenchable desire of individual voices to stand out alone. The performance lacked both clarity and freshness; it continually dragged. Similar difficulties were encountered in the four Gabrieli selections, although the fine expression and phrasing in Monteverdi's Ohime Se Tanto Amate made up for lapses in technique. With the superb playing of six members of the New England Conservatory's brass department backing them up, the combined groups offered, in the final Jubilate Deo, some of the unrestrained, full-blown sonorities the large audience had been waiting to hear.

In the less serious half of the concert, Eliot Carter's Tarantella; "Mater, Ades, Florum," precipitated a mass unrest in the graves of La Seala ghosts with its sometimes odd, other times uproarious parody of Latin opera. A tonor with a southern accent high-lighted the successful rendition of a somewhat redundant Gertrude Stein text set to Virgil Thomson music, and the Radcliffe group did nicely with Professor Ballantine's fine blending of music and words in Lake Werna's Water, a work dedicated to Professor Woodworth. A good performance of the Hindemith Choral Fugue ended the program.

Throughout, the impression was unavoidable that in both choice and interpretation of selections, too much stress was laid upon seeking works notable either for their historical significance or textual content. Tone, precision, sonority--the overall musical possibilities open to some 200 mixed voices were not given enough weight. In the final analysis, it is the sound of music which determines its worth, and the Harvard groups have been straying from this basic premise of late.