Day 8 - Budapest, Hungary & Final Concert at the Liszt Academy
On Saturday, the Glee Club’s final day of tour, we began with rehearsal. Directly after breakfast, we were welcomed into the magnificent Liszt academy. There, we reunited with our friends in the Princeton University Orchestra, legions of whom were rehearsing Gustav Holst’s seven-movement classic “the Planets.” Our soprano and alto sections were directed from place to place in an ongoing effort to maximize the heavenly Liszt acoustic.
There were some initial hurdles; after the first run of “Neptune,” orchestra conductor Michael Pratt turned to his vocal counterpart Gabriel Crouch with a furrowed brow. “It’s getting really behind,” he said, or rather bellowed out of necessity from one side of the concert hall to the other. “We can only stretch so much.” Ultimately, the higher voices were placed behind the second-floor balcony, allowing their haunting melodies to flow easily through the hall’s upper atmosphere. Later, ending “the Planets” with this effect would spark a standing ovation.
The morning rehearsal left us with several hours to enjoy the sights of Budapest in some lovely weather before our evening concert. After quick lunch stops near the concert hall, the glee club once again boarded a pack of buses, but this time on a hop-on-hop-off sightseeing tour, which crossed the Danube to visit the parliament building, castle hill, and various other crucial destinations in the city.
Back at the hotel, the Glee Club donned its formal black for the final time of the tour and proceeded to the venue. The pre-concert huddle was a Crouch special, the gist of which was simply: stay in the moment. “Ignore that,” he said as a loudspeaker interrupted him to summon us to the stage. “The show starts when we say it does.”
Five minutes later, four separate glee club choirs strode onto the stage and into aisles among the audience to open the program with the cascading “Immortal Bach.” Further highlights of the concert included a genuinely chill-inducing duet between Sloan Huebner ’23 and Hannah Bein ’22 in “O Salutaris Hostia” and chamber choir’s ever-impressive “Laudibus in Sancti.” The choral set concluded with William Henry Harris’ “Faire is the Heaven” (“that was the one,” said Gabriel later). After a warm reception and brief encore, the choir filed up to the choral stalls for a rendition of Borodin’s thrilling “Polovetsian Dances” for which caution was thrown to the winds. PUO closed out the concert with a truly awesome performance of Holst, concluding one of the most memorable programs in our glee club careers.
Only a single venue in Budapest would accommodate the over two hundred members of PUGC and PUO for a farewell dinner at nearly 11pm on the last night of our tour. We navigated twisting and wooded turns through a wildlife preserve to a seemingly remote restaurant, which had arranged for us a vast celebratory feast. As we enjoyed kettles of Goulash and platters of seasoned meats, vegetables, and rice (among other arrangements), musicians and dancers in colorful attire performed quintets and dances. The dance floor was soon crowded with glee clubbers and PUO members in a merry finale to our tour.
Signing off from back in Newark, NJ,
Theo Wells-Spackman ‘25 and Evan Chandran ‘24
