The Glee Club's concert, "Faure and Friends," features "French or French-inspired composers," according to director Louis Burkot.
While the performance will include sacred music, the singers hope to keep their audience engaged with lively selections animated by clapping and whistling.
Modern composer Erik Ridiker's calming tones set a dramatic tone for the concert, and "Requiem" by Gabriel Faure will follow, complementing Ridiker with rousing sounds.
Twenty musicians will accompany the piece, including a prominently featured harpist and romantic organist. Tyler Putnam '09 and Emma Alexander '10 will perform vocal solos.
The Glee Club will also feature the work of French composers Claude Debussy and Francis Poulenc in its program.
Alex Cook '09, the Glee Club's vice president, said he enjoyed the variety of music in the group's repertoire more than anything else.
"The ability to work on and develop different musical strengths with different works was extremely rewarding," he said.
While the group struggled to communicate the spirit behind different types of music, Cook believes that they reached a positive result.
"In working closely to really get at the heart of the musical moments and focusing on the music itself after having thoroughly learned the notes and rhythms, we were able to communicate more effectively by focusing on having strong musicianship," Cook said.
The Dartmouth Glee Club performs Saturday, Nov. 8th at 8 p.m. in Rollins Chapel.
Before leaving Hanover for Thanksgiving, students will have chance to take a break from their end-of-term stresses for the Dartmouth Symphony Orchestra concert on Nov. 22nd at 8 p.m.
Along with director Anthony Princiotti, the orchestra chose a challenging set of pieces that overlaps, in part, with the program of the group's first ever tour of Europe.
A subset of 32 members of the group will travel to Europe on tour in December, so the orchestra has combined its preparation for both the Europeans concerts and their performance in Hanover over the course of Fall term.
Since they had to practice significantly more music this term than they would normally, the touring members of the orchestra started early, arriving on campus days before the term began for rehearsals. During this practice time they aimed to develop musical aesthetics as a group.
"The results were extremely positive," Princiotti said, "both musically and in terms of building the group's sense of unity, and I think we are still feeling the positive effects of that effort."
The orchestra's repertoire includes Schubert's Fifth Symphony and the Shostakovich Chamber Symphony, as well as Tchaikovsky's Second Symphony, a powerful piece that the orchestra chose to showcase the strong dynamics of the whole group at the end of their November show.
The DSO performs at 8 p.m. on Saturday, Nov. 22nd in Spaulding Auditorium at the Hopkins Center for the Arts.
The following day, Dartmouth Chamber Singers perform for the first time this year in Rollins Chapel. As in their previous performances, the Chamber Singers, directed by Robert Duff, assemble an engaging selection of musical pieces.
According to Duff, "The repertoire captures our attention and evokes the imagination with its underlying theme: flight and transcendence."
This varied program begins with "Elohim Hashivenu," an early baroque piece written by the Jewish-Italian composer Salamone Rossi for Jewish religious ceremonies.
Two songs by American composers follow, adding modern color to the performance. The first, "Set Me as a Seal from a New Creation," was composed by Rene Clausen, who spent his career composing finely tonal, dissonant music that pushes the boundaries of chord structure.
The second, "Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine," is by Eric Whitacre, one of the most prolific and widely performed composers of the modern era.
As a highlight to their program, the Chamber Singers will perform "Songs of Experience," a new composition by William Raymer '09, based on the poetry of William Blake.
"The pieces that Chamber Singers is performing are actually taken from a 12-song cycle I wrote over the past year or so," Raymer explained.
"The texts of the Blake poems have been my main source of inspiration. I have tried to be true to the sense of Blake's language," he said.
The lyrics come from Blake's poems: "Ah, Sun- Flower," "The Lily," "The Fly" and "The Sick Rose."
During rehearsal, Raymer said he took a hands-off approach to directing his peers.
"It's not my job to tell the group how to interpret my piece," he said.
This is the debut of this composition by Raymer, who works on his music as a senior fellow at the College and plans to start graduate school in composition in the fall.
The Chamber Singers perform at 2 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 23 in Rollins Chapel.
After Thanksgiving, the Handel Society ushers in the holiday season with a concert on Dec. 2nd that includes seasonal music.
The Handel Society is composed of equal parts students, faculty and members of the local community. Founded in 1807, the Handel Society is one of the oldest college ensembles in the country.
Their concert this term will start with "A Ceremony of Carols," which Benjamin Britten wrote in 1942 while crossing the Atlantic on a boat from America to England. It opens with angelic soprano vocals accompanied by the harp, setting the tone for a seasonally themed performance. As a bookend to this first piece, the evening ends with Johann Sebastian Bach's "Magnificat," a composition of 14 movements that features trumpet and timpani to awaken the audience's holiday spirit.
The Handel Society performs at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 2nd in Spaulding Auditorium.
