Arts News

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 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.

Following the Latonics, the Roxbury Latin Glee Club made its seasonal stride down the aisles of Rousmaniere to join its brethren in song. The group began with the heartfelt Waitin’ for the Dawn of Peace, an American Civil War folk song. The Glee Club then masterfully performed O Vos Omnes, a Renaissance motet, and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, a tribute to Robert Frost’s poem with pianist Chris Zhu (I). It’s All Right brought some ’60s soul to the festival with Tommy Reichard (IV), Eli Bailit (III), and Richard Impert (I) soloing. The Glee Club closed with Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit,

a classic American Spiritual. Emmanuel Nwodo (IV), Esteban Tarazona (II), and Frankie Lonergan (II) manned the song’s three solos.

Fittingly, the night ended with a combined performance by all four groups. A hearty rendition of Brothers, Sing On! was followed by the inspiring Seize the Day, with pianist Jonathan Weiss (I), which earned a standing ovation from the crowd. The last two performances captured the overarching success of the concert and the night’s theme of unity in brotherhood. //

Photos by John Werner

Can You Handle The Truth? RL Showcases A Few Good Men

On November 22 and 23, Roxbury Latin staged this year’s Senior Play—Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men. In the play, two U.S. Marines are facing a court-martial, accused of murdering a fellow Marine at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. While it is believed that his death was retribution for his naming another Marine in a fence line shooting, Naval investigator and lawyer Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway suspects the two carried out a “Code Red” order: a violent extrajudicial punishment. While Galloway wants to defend them, the case is given to the inexperienced and lazy Lt. Daniel Kaffee. The case goes to court, and what unfolds is emblematic of the tight narrative pacing and rapid-fire dialogue that viewers have come to expect from writer Aaron Sorkin.

Sorkin has been a prolific force in American film and television over several decades. While many people are familiar with the 1992 film adaptation, A Few Good Men was a play before it was a screenplay. Roxbury Latin boys—along with Winsor student Katie Burstein, who played Lt. Commander Joanne Galloway in the production—successfully brought to life the tension, complexity, and humanity of Sorkin’s writing on the Smith Theater stage.

In a recent Tripod article, senior Jonathan Weiss explored faculty member and director Derek Nelson’s decision to stage A Few Good Men this fall: When Mr. Nelson searched for this year’s Senior Play, he had the school’s 375th anniversary in mind. His first instinct was to find a play written literally in the 17th century… but A Few Good Men ties in with the 375th in a profound way. It deals with history, with education, and with core Roxbury Latin themes like honesty and loyalty.

A Few Good Men is brilliantly written: “Aaron Sorkin is a master of both overarching plot structure and scenes,” says Mr. Nelson. “He manages to push just the right buttons to get the audience on the edge of their seats.” Dauntingly, excitingly, the play moves fast: “The challenge is that there is a lot of language, and you have to make those scenes pop.”

Best of all, A Few Good Men is delightfully out-of-the-box. Seldom does a mainstream movie… grace the RL stage. Mr. Nelson would stress, though, that the intention was not to recreate the movie, but rather to bring to stage the original Broadway play. As director, he did not aim to “match the tone, or interplay between characters, or even the readings of the lines in the way that they were directed in the film.” At the same time, he did not command the cast not to imitate the movie. His goal? “I want the actors to find themselves in Colonel Jessup, in the judge, and so on.”//

RL’s student musicians treated their classmates to a variety of performances in two Recital Halls—on December 5 and January 16. The December 5 set included Franz Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata by Chris Zhu (I) on piano and Eric Zhu (V) on viola; Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fugue no.7 in A Major by Heshie Liebowitz (III) on piano; Niccolò Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 by Alex Yin (III) on violin, and a late 19th-century Varnam in the Southern Indian Carnatic tradition by Vishnu Emani (III) on violin, Aditya Mahadaven ’16 on drums, and Hari Narayanan (I) on vocals. //

Alex Yin (III), Chris Zhu (I), Eric Zhu (V), Heshie Liebowitz (III), Hari Narayanan (I), Aditya Mahadaven ’16, Vishnu Emani (III), and Dr. Andrés Wilson

The January 16 Recital Hall featured Claude Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor by the RL String Quartet; two ofFrédéric Chopin’s Études (Wrong Note and The Torrent) by Theo Teng (III) on piano; Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango by Ben Kelly (III) on cello and Heshie Liebowitz (III) on piano; Overgrown Cathedral, an original piano composition by Jonathan Weiss (I); and Cream’s White Room by RL’s newly formed Guitar Ensemble under the direction of Dr. Andrés Wilson. //

First Row: Eli Mamuya (IV), Theo Teng (III), Jonathan Weiss (I), Heshie Liebowitz (III), Justin Shaw (IV), Ben Kelly (III), Alex Yin (III), Justin Yamaguchi (V); Second Row: Ryan Miller (VI), Vishnu Emani (III), Nahum Workalemahu (IV), Anton Rabkin (III), Jack McCarthy (IV), Tait Oberg (IV), and Joseph Wang (V)