America's Oldest College Choir to Perform in Salt Lake City

SALT LAKE CITY — The Harvard Glee Club, America’s oldest collegiate choir, will perform a free public concert at the Cathedral of the Madeleine on Tuesday, June 10, 2008 at 8:00 p.m.

The 60-voice choir will perform repertoire ranging from Renaissance polyphony to classical and contemporary selections, as well as international folk music.

The Glee Club also features a subset ensemble called Glee Club Lite, which will perform a few pop a cappella selections.

Numerous sponsors have contributed to support the Glee Club’s concert in Salt Lake City, including Leucadia Financial Corporation, St. Vincent de Paul Parish, St. Mark’s Cathedral, and Dr. George Eisenman.

The Glee Club is widely considered to be the top collegiate men’s choir in America.

In 2005, it was the only such group invited to perform at the national convention of the American Choral Directors’ Association.

The Glee Club has performed with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Netherlands Chamber Orchestra, and the Italian Radio Orchestra, and has produced several award-winning classical recordings.

The Glee Club counts many prominent Americans among the ranks of its alumni, including Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Elliot Carter, Irving Fine, and John Harbison.

The year 2008 marks the 150th anniversary of the Harvard Glee Club. The group has embarked on numerous national and international tours from 1921 to the present, including concerts in Europe, Asia, Australia, and throughout Canada and the U.S.

This year, the Glee Club celebrates its anniversary with its first nationwide American tour since 1978.

The 20-concert lineup includes a recently completed spring tour of the Eastern Seaboard and an upcoming summer tour of the Midwest, Mountain West, and West Coast. The Glee Club’s current repertoire is available at www.harvardgleeclub.org/info/repertoire.

The repertoire includes Pulitzer Prize- and Grammy-winning composer Dominick Argento’s three-movement Apollo in Cambridge, recently commissioned by the Harvard Glee Club Foundation.

The Glee Club is conducted by Harvard’s Director of Choral Activities and Glendale, Calif. native Dr. Jameson Marvin, whom the Boston Globe has described as "a choral director of consummate mastery."

This season marks Dr. Marvin’s 30th year as Conductor of the Glee Club. During that time, he has been invited to conduct Harvard’s choirs in sixteen national and regional conventions of the American Choral Directors’ Associaton (ACDA).

The Cathedral of the Madeleine, the venue for the Harvard Glee Club’s performance, is the mother church for the diocese in Salt Lake City.

The Cathedral, which will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2009, continues to play a central role in the downtown arts community, hosting the annual Madeleine Festival for the Arts and Humanities, the Eccles Organ Festival, and numerous performances by the choristers of the Madeleine Choir School.

Additional information about the Glee Club’s 150th Anniversary Tour is available at the Glee Club’s tour website: www.harvardgleeclub.org/tour/.