While many flocked to the fields for the Yale-Princeton game on Saturday, there were also several music performances around campus. Eva Galvan reports on what she heard.
Two of a kind: A cappella
This Saturday, the Yale Spizzwinks (?) and the Princeton Tigerlilies held their annual joint concert in the Saybrook Underbrook.
“It’s a tradition where one of the rules is they forget how it started,” said Tigerlily Denali Barron.
While the a cappella groups have been affiliated for years, they now have a real brother-sister relationship: Spizzwink Kent Twardock ’11 and Tigerlily Sarah Twardock are twins. Kent sang his solo “If Ever I Would Leave You,” and his sister soloed with the popular “Les Miserables” song “On My Own.”
“In high school, I played the euphonium in band, and she played the violin in orchestra,” said Kent Twardock. “Then we sang together in the high school chamber choir and sang in musicals for junior and senior year.”
The Spizzwinks (?) sang classics such as “Build Me Up Buttercup” and “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” which flowed into the Tigerlilies’ renditions of “Sweet Forgiveness,” “Leader of the Pack” and “When I’m 64.” The Spizzwinks (?) closed their part of the performance with one thing both Princetonians and Yalies can agree on: “Goodnight, Harvard,” a part of the medley of Yale fight songs.
Victorian Tunes: Orchestra
The Yale Symphony Orchestra and the Schola Cantorum, a chamber choir supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, performed a concert that marked the North American Studies Association’s annual meeting at Yale at Woolsey Hall on Saturday evening. Schola Cantorum sang choral songs from Victorian and Edwardian Britain, one of which featured the YSO’s brass section. The orchestra performance included Haydn’s Symphony No. 92 in G major and Symphony No. 1, Op. 55 in A-flat major by Sir Edward Elgar, which was dedicated to the recently deceased professor Jesse Levine, who taught viola and was coordinator of the string department.
The first song, “Yale-Princeton Football Game” by Charles Ives, featured a coming-together of a different kind than that of the a cappella performance: The audience participated in the song with singing membranophones — better known as kazoos — conducted by Brian Robinson, the manager of the YSO.
“I may or may not use jazz hands at the end,” said Robinson, who proceeded to vibrate open hands above his head during the final note of the song.
Re-imagining the baroque: Opera
The Yale Baroque Opera Project put on “Capriccio Barocco” in front of a full audience at the Trinity Lutheran Church on Saturday and Sunday. This performance unified past and present in a modern interpretation of pieces by Francesco Cavalli. Songs from several operas were used to detail the struggles of a contemporary theater company putting on Cavalli’s “La Didone,” the story of Aeneas and Dido.
“Richard Lalli [who teaches a course on early opera] takes something like baroque opera, which can be archaic and boring, and makes it relevant,” said Adam Begley ’11. “That’s his genius.”
The production team gave creative titles to individual scenes such as “Frustration in the Dressing Room,” “The Diva Reflects and Dreams,” “Nerves before the Audition” and “Chance Encounters Backstage.” For Part Two of the opera, the cast put on a condensed version of “La Didone.”