Not just any old chorus gets invited to even participate in the Music Festival in Spoleto, Italy. But only the finest of the groups in the world get invited to function as the Festival Chorus. The latter distinction was bestowed recently upon Harvard's Collegium Musicum, a collection of 70 amateur vocalists who combine to form a chorus of undeniably professional caliber. The mixed chorus of 70 who, as one member put it, "like to sing more than just about anything else," will present their first concert of the season this Friday night in St. Paul's Church.
The broad range of the group's repertoire is one of its most pleasant features. In the Collegium's first overseas tour last summer that took them to England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, newspaper reviews heralded the "young Americans" as a "vitally alive" and "smooth" chorus that, "gave new depth to a medieval choral art which in many ways is already dying." The reviews of their performance of contemporary American music (which they sang in Europe to honor the Bicentennial) were equally complimentary. Friday night the group, accompanied by a small orchestra, will plow through non-secular choral masterpieces of yet another period in a concert devoted entirely to Mozart works.
F. John Adams, the young and vibrant adopted father of the Harvard Glee Club, is the real father of the Collegium Musicum, which he established in 1971. In the late 60's the Radcliffe Choral Society dissolved, leaving women without a chorus in which to sing, since the extant Glee Club has traditionally been all-male. This lack provoked a number of women to recruit some men--and form a splinter choral group which ultimately would serve two crucial functions: it would operate as a vehicle for women to exercise their vocal cords and as a medium by which some of the world's finest choral music--works for mixed choruses--could be performed at Harvard.
And this weekend, Collegium will perform some of the finest of the mixed choral music ever composed. The formidable ensemble will sing the young Mozart's Missa Solemnis, Sancta Maria, Litaniae Lauretanae, Kyrie K. 323, Qualite Primum Regnum, and Venite Populi.
