Christmas Concert

Last night's joint Christmas Concert of the Harvard Glee Club, Radcliffe Choral Society and Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra was, let me assert immediately and axiomatically, the best concert any of the three groups have given here in the past, say, three years. Or say four years. I don't care.

Michael Senturia, the principal conductor of the evening, chose a formidable program, demanding Stravinsky (his Symphony of Psalms) and sprightly Beethoven (the Second Symphony). It takes great temerity on the part of any college conductor to think of scheduling even the Beethoven, which is not the silly little Mozartian nothing many people think it, let alone the Stravinsky, which does have the simplicity, order and concentration of the best of Mozart.

But unlike Mozart, Stravinsky's setting of three Latin psalms is angular, harsh and massive. The chorus is made to sing heavy, declarative lines, which must, for a performance to succeed, be delineated and articulated with considerable precision. And last night under Mr. Senturia's direction, the Glee Club and Choral Society sang the Psalms impeccably. Their tone, full and fortunately wholesome, was rigidly controlled throughout, attacks were impressively clean, and self assured.

And Mr. Senturia's pared-down orchestra (the Symphony is scored for brass, winds, tympani and 'cellos) provided an admirable accompaniment. The first desk winds handled the fugal introduction to the second psalm with ease, a particularly delicate passage full of grace and restraint, and in the more monolithic third psalm the brasses showed strength and carefully controlled enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm and confidence, indeed, were a distinctive feature of the evening. In the first half of the program, the orchestra, solus, attacked the more-than-Mozartian Beethoven with refreshing vigor. Too often enthusiasm is the mark of the obvious (like Sir Arthur Sullivan) or the sloppy (like Dmitri Mitropolous). But the HRO has struck a balance: their performance of the Second Symphony was robust and remarkably successful. Mr. Senturia's tempos were well chosen, his dynamics well modulated, his orchestra's tone large and rich. And if the winds sometimes seemed a bit lost, the strings were at their best, and behold, the tympanist was wonderfully good.

The evening opened with J. S. Bach's Motet V, for which--an admission which will delight my numerous correspondents--I was not present. What I did hear, though, was first-rate. If Christmas and Christmas concerts only came more than once a year.