GLEE CLUB'S CONCERT HIGHLY SATISFACTORY

The Harvard Glee Club gave the last concert of its Boston series Wednesday evening to an enthusiastic audience which crowded Symphony Hall. Fritz Kreisler, the assisting artist, played the Brahms G major Sonata and a group of short pieces with his familiar skill and taste. The Glee Club has been remarkably fortunate in its soloists this season in Boston. Like the Boston Symphony Orchestra, however, the Glee Club need not fear that anyone will make disparaging comparisons between its work and that of such admirable assisting artists as Kreisler, Hempel and Albert Spalding. This chorus, almost alone among amateur choruses in the United States, will bear judgment by the highest professional standards. It no longer needs apologists except when it has to cope with people who share the curious prejudice that there is something not thoroughly manly about college men singing anything but bad music.

Dr. Davison's policy of cutting down the membership of the Glee Club during the season was vindicated by a marked improvement in the quality of tone over the first concert last December. He has now moulded the chorus into a body of singers surprisingly responsive to his slightest musical wish. He has made the Glee Club a finely sensitive musical instrument, upon which he can play as he will. This is a very great achievement in itself, how great only those with experience in directing choruses can fully realize. Only hard and intelligent team work on the part of all concerned has made it possible.

The program Wednesday showed to the initiated signs of the limited repertory of music written for male choruses. Several of the numbers were arrangements made by Dr. Davison himself. Of these the version of six of the Brahms "Love Songs" was especially effective, and faithful to the spirit of the original. It was suavely, yet feelingly sung, with the extraordinary technical precision which was more strikingly illustrated in Weelkes' "The Nightingale", a mere show piece.

The high spirits in Stanford's setting of a Browning "Cavalier Song" and the exultant faith of "Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones" were rendered with accurate energy. "De Profundis", on the other hand was made to seem hollow and perfunctory by the hurried staccato delivery of the words. There was more theatricality than feeling in the interpretation. Rachmaninoff's "Cherubim Song", too, became a meaningless jumble of vocal effects, in which one could not see the forest for the trees.

W. B. Martin '21 deserves high praise for his admirable singing of the tenor solo, "Has Sorrow Thy Young Days Shaded," to a hummed accompaniment by the fellow members of the Glee Club. Few professional tenors could give as polished and sensitive a performance as his.

This concert proved anew the musical fitness of the Glee Club to represent in Europe the best that American culture has yet achieved. It is the latest of many triumphs.