walter l. nollner memorial concert 2023

Saturday February 25th, 2023 @ 7:30pm
Richardson Auditorium in Alexander Hall

Check out this publication in the Daily Princetonian done on our concert!

This endowed concert in memory of the Glee Club’s 35-year former director is the traditional farewell event for senior members of the choir, each of whom was presented to the audience in a moving ceremony at the concert’s midpoint. 

This year’s enterprising repertoire combined an all-time favorite work of J.S. Bach with a brand new work by Caroline Shaw - a former Princeton student whose stunning success as a composer has already earned her three Grammys and a Pulitzer Prize. Shaw’s work ‘The Listeners’, commissioned in 2018 for the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, brings to life the enterprise and humility of its subject matter - NASA’s ‘Golden Record’ of 1977, curated by Carl Sagan - in which a record of the vast breadth of human language and culture was beamed into the cosmos on board the Voyager spacecraft, as an intergalactic greeting. In the words of Kurt Waldheim, the secretary general of the UN who offered his own greeting to be included on the Golden Record: “We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step…”

Alongside Shaw’s new masterpiece we performed two works by J.S. Bach - the Cantata BWV50 ‘Nun ist das heil und die kraft’, and the most enduringly popular of all his choral works - ‘The Magnificat’. Composed for Bach’s first Christmas Day service in Leipzig, ‘The Magnificat’ sets a fittingly celebratory tone for a city then in its cultural and intellectual prime, with twelve movements drawing the audience through delirious exhilaration and pointed reflection. The Cantata ’Nun ist das heil’ has not survived complete - but the single surviving movement, which was performed in both single and double-choir versions each conducted by one of the Glee Club’s student conductors, represented Bach at his most joyous, with brilliant trumpet flourishes and highly virtuosic vocal writing. 

This concert was presented in partnership with “02.24.2022”, the Princeton student group aiming to support the victims of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Performing alongside the Glee Club were esteemed soloists Sonya Headlam, soprano; Robin Bier, contralto; David Kellett, tenor; and Charles Wesley Evans, baritone. Video projection design is provided by Camilla Tassi.

View the program below!