Everett High grad returns with Harvard Glee Club
Published 12:49 pm Thursday, June 19, 2008
Walker Stanovsky, who graduated from Everett High School in 2002, can list his name with fellow alumni Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, Leonard Bernstein and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun as a performer with Harvard Glee Club, America’s oldest college choir.
Stanovsky and Harvard Glee Club sing tonight at Meany Hall for the Performing Arts in Seattle. This is the first time in 30 years the choir has performed in Seattle.
The choir celebrates its 150th anniversary this year with a 20-city nationwide tour including venues such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and Ravinia Festival in Chicago. Stanovsky, tour publicity manager for the club and a lifelong Puget Sound native, called himself fortunate to be returning with the choir to perform at Meany.
The singers’ stay in Seattle will feature dinner from Dick’s Drive-In, and Stanovsky plans to lead willing glee club members on an excursion into the Cascade Mountains.
For the Meany Hall performance, director Jameson Marvin, who is senior lecturer on music at Harvard University, will conduct the 60-voice men’s choir in a program of works including Renaissance polyphonic pieces (music with several melodies) to classical, contemporary and folk music from around the world. The repertoire, which honors the Grammy-nominated glee club’s past, includes the West Coast premiere of Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer Dominick Argento’s triptych “Apollo in Cambridge,” commissioned by the Harvard Glee Club Foundation for the choir’s anniversary. Also featured are works by Palestrina, Britten and Rachmaninoff, as well as a range of recognizable college football fight songs originally created by the glee club. In addition to the full glee club, a 16-member subset called Glee Club Lite performs a selection of pop a cappella music.
The glee club has twice performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl, appeared at the Vatican under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, and has sung with the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony and the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra.
