Festival of Men’s Choruses: Musical Brotherhood by ETHAN PHAN, Class II, and DANIEL BERK, Class II
On November 8, Rousmaniere Hall was filled with the sound of more than 100 male voices singing in harmony at the Festival of Men’s Choruses. While the festival is an annual tradition, this year’s concert was special: Catholic Memorial’s Chorale and the St. Albans School Madrigal Singers from Washington, D.C. joined the Roxbury Latin Glee Club and the Belmont Hill B-Flats in celebration of RL’s 375th anniversary. First to perform was the CM Chorale. Formed only last year, the group delivered a strong performance, opening their fivepiece set with a traditional Muskogee song titled Heleluyan, featuring a canon with the title of the song as the sole lyric. Next, CM performed the Gregorian chant Gloria in unison and Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus—two sacred pieces. To end, they sang CM’s fight song Cheer! Hail! Fight! and a jaunty rendition of There is Nothing Like a Dame. Next up were the St. Albans Madrigal Singers, who performed with synchronization and skill in their four songs, the first of which was the Italian piece Ad Amore. The close harmonies in the piece delighted the audience. The Madrigal Singers followed up this impressive opening with Bound for the Promised Land, an early American hymn, and Biebl’s antiphonal Ave Maria, a
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hallmark of men’s choral music. For Ave Maria, a bass, baritone, and tenor trio sang from the balcony, giving the piece a calland-response sensation. The group concluded with a special performance of Men of the Future, Stand. Veterans of the festival, the Belmont Hill B-Flats anchored the guest performances with a strong four-song showing. They opened with I Can See Clearly Now, a familiar Johnny Nash tune. They moved on to the more doleful Prayer of the Children and then the more contemporary Castle on the Hill. The B-Flats finished with the Canadian folk song Northwest Passage, with their new headmaster, Gregory Schneider, singing the solo. After intermission, the Roxbury Latin Latonics reopened the show with three stellar pieces. First, the group debuted its rendition of Ave Maria, written by Tomás Luis de Victoria. They followed this polyphonic motet with the somber Irish folk song Danny Boy. Baritone Christian Landry (I) hit every note in the solo and touched every heart in the audience. Finally, the Latonics performed the fan-favorite Brown-Eyed Girl. Tenor Ale Philippides’s (III) solo had the entire crowd swooning, brown-eyed or not.
