Performance Activities
Musical Organizations
Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale
The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale is one of America’s foremost music school ensembles. The largest performing group at the Yale School of Music, the Philharmonia offers superb training in orchestral playing and repertoire.
Performances include an annual series of concerts in Woolsey Hall as well as Yale Opera productions in the Shubert Performing Arts Center. The Philharmonia Orchestra of Yale has performed on numerous occasions in Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York City, Symphony Hall in Boston, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Recent appearances at Carnegie Hall as part of the Yale in New York series were praised by the New York Times as “sensational” and “tightly wrought, polished, and dramatic.” The Philharmonia has toured in France and Italy, and in 2008 undertook its first tour of Asia, with acclaimed performances in the Seoul Arts Center, the Forbidden City Concert Hall and National Centre for the Performing Arts (Beijing), and the Shanghai Grand Theatre.
The beginnings of orchestral music at Yale can be traced to 1894, when an orchestra was organized under the leadership of the School’s first dean, Horatio Parker. Music directors in recent years have included such distinguished musicians as Gustav Meier, Otto-Werner Mueller, William Steinberg, Eleazar de Carvalho, Günther Herbig, and Lawrence Leighton Smith. Shinik Hahm is the conductor in residence, and Peter Oundjian is the orchestra’s principal guest conductor.
Guest conductors who have worked with the orchestra over the years include William Christie, Aaron Copland, Reinbert de Leeuw, David Effron, Szymon Goldberg, Sidney Harth, Danny Kaye, Anatoly Levin, Jahja Ling, Andrew Litton, John Mauceri, Krzysztof Penderecki, Robert Shaw, Leopold Stokowski, Georg Tintner, and Samuel Wong. Guest soloists Hermann Baumann, horn; Maureen Forrester, contralto; Richard Goode, piano; Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; Ivo Pogorelich, piano; Tony Randall, narrator; Shauna Rolston, cello; Mstislav Rostropovich, cello; Jian Wang, cello; and André Watts, piano, have all appeared with the orchestra.
New Music New Haven
New Music New Haven, under the direction of Christopher Theofanidis, presents new and recent compositions by faculty, students, and guest composers. Performers are students in the School and often include guest artists as well. The programs often feature music by a member of the composition faculty or by a renowned guest composer. An important part of the series is a program of new works for orchestra by Yale composers performed by the full Philharmonia Orchestra in Woolsey Hall.
Yale Opera
Under the artistic direction of Doris Yarick-Cross, Yale Opera students perform in full-scale, mainstage productions as well as in programs of scenes. Performances during the 2011–2012 academic year were directed by acclaimed directors Justin Way, Marc Verzatt, and Vera Calábria; additionally, world-renowned opera director Michael Hampe directed and taught Yale Opera students in a weeklong workshop. Recent productions, including Così fan tutte, Don Giovanni, Le nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, Die Fledermaus, La Bohème, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Gianni Schicchi, and Suor Angelica, were presented at New Haven’s historic Shubert Performing Arts Center. Yale Opera has produced more intimate productions in Sprague Hall, including The Rape of Lucretia, The Scarf, Dido and Aeneas, Le Rossignol, La tragédie de Carmen, The Bear, La Navarraise, Bluebeard’s Castle, L’heure espagnole, Orphée aux Enfers, Trouble in Tahiti, Kat’a Kabanova, and Le Médecin malgré lui.
Each year, Yale Opera offers a series of public vocal master classes. In recent years, Alan Held, Jennifer Larmore, Elly Ameling, Sherrill Milnes, Gabriella Tucci, Marilyn Horne, Carlo Bergonzi, and Renata Scotto have conducted master classes in Morse Recital Hall.
The Yale Symphony Orchestra
The Yale Symphony Orchestra is Yale’s premier undergraduate orchestra. Under the direction of its music director, Toshiyuki Shimada, the YSO performs an average of seven concerts annually in Woolsey Hall and elsewhere. In addition to providing the Yale community a stellar musical outlet, the YSO is notorious for its annual Halloween Show, which has been an institution of the Yale College community for over thirty years.
Many of the Yale Symphony’s alumni have gone on to roles in major orchestras around the world, from the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, and San Francisco Symphony to the Israel Philharmonic and Orchestre National de France. The orchestra has shared the stage with internationally recognized artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Frederica von Stade, David Shifrin, Emanuel Ax, and Dawn Upshaw, and annually gives undergraduates the opportunity to perform major concerti through the William Waite Concerto Competition. The Yale Symphony has presented national and world premieres of numerous works, including the European premiere of Leonard Bernstein’s Mass in 1973. The YSO has performed at major concert halls in the United States and around the world, and tours both internationally and domestically.
The Yale Bands
Although the constituency of the Yale Bands is predominantly undergraduate, wind, brass, and percussion instrument majors of the School of Music are eligible for membership and often have the opportunity to gain conducting experience by assisting the director. The Yale Bands include a concert band of fifty-five select musicians, a jazz ensemble (drawn from the core group—an eighteen-piece big band), and a marching band of approximately 50–100 students that performs at sports events throughout the year.
The Concert Band and its component ensembles perform in Woolsey Hall and Morse Recital Hall. Since 1959, the Concert Band has produced twenty-six international concert tours, performing in England, France, Japan, Austria, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Finland, Russia, the Czech Republic, Brazil, and Mexico; it was the first Yale ensemble to perform on the continent of Africa (Ceuta). American tours have featured concerts in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Marine Corps Band Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the National Building Museum, in New York City’s Symphony Space and Carnegie Hall, and at the Miami Ives Festival. The band’s ninety-fourth season of free concerts will feature three world premieres, a collaboration with the Yale Glee Club, and an international tour.
The Yale Jazz Ensemble has performed in London’s finest jazz club, Ronnie Scott’s, and twice with the Mel Lewis Band in New York City’s Village Vanguard. The Jazz Ensemble performs classic big band and combo jazz, and premieres music by Yale composers. Students in the School of Music are welcome to audition for the group, and have the opportunity to serve as assistant to the director.
The Yale Glee Club
Yale’s oldest musical organization and principal undergraduate mixed chorus, the Glee Club began as thirteen members of the class of 1863 and has evolved today into a chorus of eighty women and men from across the University. The ensemble performs a broad range of choral repertoire from the sixteenth century to the present, commissioning new choral works and performing major choral orchestral works every season, frequently in collaboration with the University’s other major choral ensembles and orchestras. In recent years the Glee Club has appeared under the baton of such distinguished guest artists as Sir Neville Marriner, Helmuth Rilling, Sir David Willcocks, and Krzysztof Penderecki. One of the world’s most traveled collegiate choruses, the Glee Club tours extensively each year and has appeared on six continents in the world’s most prestigious concert halls.
Membership in the Glee Club is open to all Yale students by audition, primarily to undergraduates. Members of the Glee Club may also audition for the Glee Club Chamber Singers, a select ensemble of sixteen to twenty singers. Qualified students in the School of Music and Institute of Sacred Music often have the opportunity to serve as assistant conductor to the Glee Club and director of the Glee Club Chamber Singers.
The Yale Camerata
Founded in 1985 by its conductor, Marguerite L. Brooks, the Yale Camerata is a vocal ensemble sponsored by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. The group’s approximately sixty singers are Yale graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, staff, and experienced singers from the New Haven community. The Camerata performs a widely varied spectrum of choral literature, with a special commitment to choral music of our time. The Camerata has collaborated with the Yale Glee Club, Yale Philharmonia, Yale Symphony, Yale Band, Yale Chamber Players, Yale Collegium Musicum, the New Haven Chorale, and the symphony orchestras of Hartford, New Haven, and Norwalk. The ensemble has also performed for Yale Music Spectrum and New Music New Haven. The chamber choir of the Yale Camerata has performed at the Yale Center for British Art and at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall. In 1999 they traveled to Germany to perform the Berlioz Requiem with choirs from Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Israel, Great Britain, and the Ukraine and in 2001 spent a week in residence at Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. The Camerata has been heard on Connecticut Public Radio and national broadcasts of National Public Radio’s program “Performance Today.” Guest conductors have included Robert Shaw, Jaap Schröder, George Guest, Sir David Willcocks, Krzysztof Penderecki, Helmuth Rilling, and Dale Warland. With the Institute of Sacred Music, the Camerata has commissioned and premiered works of Martin Bresnick, Daniel Kellogg, Stephen Paulus, Daniel Pinkham, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, among others. The chorus has sung first performances of works by many composers including Francine Trester, Julia Wolfe, and Kathryn Alexander.
Yale Schola Cantorum
Yale Schola Cantorum, founded in 2003 by Simon Carrington, is a twenty-four-voice chamber choir that sings in concerts and choral services. Supported by the Yale Institute of Sacred Music with the School of Music, and open by audition to all Yale students, it specializes in music from before 1750 and the last hundred years. Since 2009 Schola Cantorum has been under the direction of Masaaki Suzuki. In addition to performing regularly in New Haven and New York, the choir records and tours nationally and internationally. Schola Cantorum’s live recording with Robert Mealy and Yale Collegium Musicum of Heinrich Biber’s 1693 Vesperae longiores ac breviores has received international acclaim from the early music press, as have subsequent CDs of J.S. Bach’s rarely heard 1725 version of the St. John Passion and Antonio Bertali’s Missa resurrectionis. A commercial recording on the Naxos label of Mendelssohn and Bach Magnificats was released in fall 2009. Schola Cantorum has toured internationally in England, Hungary, France, China, South Korea, Italy, Greece, and Turkey, and will travel to Japan and Singapore in June of 2013. In recent years, the choir has sung under the direction of the internationally renowned conductors Helmuth Rilling, Krzysztof Penderecki, Sir Neville Marriner, Stephen Layton, Paul Hillier, Nicholas McGegan, Dale Warland, James O’Donnell, Simon Halsey, David Hill, and Stefan Parkman. During the 2012–2013 season, Schola performs Bach motets with Masaaki Suzuki in New Haven and Boston; Suzuki conducts performances of Bach’s Mass in B Minor with Schola and Juilliard415 in New Haven and New York. Guest conductors in 2012–2013 include Nicholas McGegan, Erwin Ortner, and Simon Carrington.
The Battell Chapel Choir
The Battell Chapel Choir, conducted by a second- or third-year student, is open to all Yale students. The choir sings for Sunday services in the University Chapel during term time and offers two or three additional concerts. Members are chosen by audition and paid for singing in the choir.
The Marquand Chapel Choir
The Marquand Chapel Choir, conducted by a second- or third-year student, sings twice a week for services in the Divinity School Chapel as well as for two additional services during the year. Members of the choir, chosen by audition, receive credit for participation; section leaders may opt for payment instead of credit.
Concerts and Recitals
Faculty Artist Series
Faculty members of the School, many of whom are internationally recognized concert artists, share the point of view that part of their commitment to music and to teaching in a university involves regular and frequent performance, on campus and elsewhere. There is no admission fee for these concerts.
The Oneppo Chamber Music Series
The Oneppo Chamber Music Series at Yale, sponsored by the School of Music and under the direction of David Shifrin, presents its ninety-sixth season of Sprague Hall subscription concerts in 2012–2013. Formerly known as the Chamber Music Society at Yale, the concert series has been named the Oneppo Chamber Music Series in honor of its former director, Vincent Oneppo. Continuing the tradition of presenting the finest chamber music ensembles from around the world, the 2012–2013 season features concerts by the Tokyo and Jasper string quartets; Tafelmusik; the unconventional duo of Igudesman and Joo; the Orion String Quartet with Windscape; and a program by winners of the School’s 2013 Chamber Music Competition.
The Horowitz Piano Series at Yale
Directed by Boris Berman, this series of piano recitals was established in 2000 and is dedicated to the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz, whose musical archive resides at Yale. In addition to recitals by the Yale piano faculty, there are concerts and public master classes by distinguished guests each year. In past seasons these guest artists included Anton Kuerti, Idil Biret, Malcolm Bilson, Pierre Réach, Severin von Eckardstein, Yefim Bronfman, Garrick Ohlsson, Alexei Lubimov, Emanuel Ax, Tigran Alikhanov, Radu Lupu, Ruth Laredo, Mischa Dichter, and Fou Ts’ong. The upcoming season features recitals by guest artists Radu Lupu, Emanuel Ax, and Paul Lewis as well as recitals by faculty artists including Boris Berman, Hung-Kuan Chen, Peter Frankl, and Wei-Yi Yang.
Yale in New York
In 2011–2012 the School of Music presented four concerts at Carnegie Hall as part of the Yale in New York Series, directed by David Shifrin. Concerts in Zankel Hall included “Vocal Britain,” with music by Britten and Walton, and an all-Handel program featuring guest conductor William Christie. Concerts in Weill Recital Hall included a marathon of the complete Prokofiev piano sonatas and “De Profundis,” a program of music for low instruments including Gubaidulina’s concerto for bassoon and low strings. The 2012–2013 season features four concerts, beginning with a celebration of the Tokyo String Quartet in its last season together. A conductor-less string orchestra of faculty, alumni, and students will perform. In Weill Hall, the series celebrates Mozart’s birthday and commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of Hindemith’s death.
Collection of Musical Instruments Concert Series
A series of five concerts is presented annually by the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments. These concerts present a roster of internationally distinguished performers, including in recent seasons Florilegium, guitarist John Schneiderman, Sarasa, harpsichordist Linda Skernick, the Aulos Ensemble, La Riche & Co., Ensemble El Mundo, Ensemble Caprice, David Owen Norris with Sonnerie, violinist John Holloway, London Baroque, harpsichordists Corey Jamason and Davitt Moroney, pianists Carsten Schmidt and Steven Lubin, cellist Anner Bylsma, ensemble project Ars Nova, violinist Jaap Schröder, and the Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet. The concerts frequently feature the use of restored instruments from the collection.
The Duke Ellington Fellowship Series
The Duke Ellington Fellowship, directed by Willie Ruff, offers concerts by prominent jazz musicians each year. Recent seasons have featured groups headed by Jane Ira Bloom, Dave Brubeck, Kenny Burrell, Don Byron, Ron Carter, Eddie Daniels, Elvin Jones, James Moody, Joshua Redman, Clark Terry, Frank Wess, and Randy Weston; the Carnegie Hall Jazz Band with Jon Faddis; solo pianists Dick Hyman and Barry Harris; bass-baritone William Warfield; and “The Whole Drum Truth,” a concert by drummers Albert “Tootie” Heath, Louis Hayes, Kenny Washington, and Willie Jones III. The Mitchell-Ruff Duo, with Professor Ruff on horn and bass and Dwike Mitchell on piano, appears frequently on the series, often with guest artists. Visiting performers often present free concerts and master classes for children in addition to concerts for general audiences.
Great Organ Music at Yale
Great Organ Music at Yale is a concert series sponsored by the Institute of Sacred Music. The series includes programs by the faculty, visiting artists, and other noted performers. In 2012–2013 the visiting guest artist will be Vincent Dubois. Additional concerts in the series will be by Isabelle Demers and Francesco Cera.
Chamber Music, Ensembles, and Vocal Concerts
School of Music performers have ample opportunities to perform publicly as members of various ensembles and as soloists. Among the prominent departmental ensembles that perform regularly are the Yale Cellos, directed by Aldo Parisot, and the Yale Percussion Group, under Robert van Sice. In addition, a number of concert series are organized through the School’s chamber music program, directed by Wendy Sharp. These include the Lunchtime Chamber Music series, which takes place in Sprague Hall and at the Yale Center for British Art; Vista, a series that features chamber music groups that provide commentary and program notes; and concerts of chamber music for guitar in combination with other instruments, under the direction of Benjamin Verdery. Yale Opera offers a Liederabend series, in which a different language (German, Italian, French, or Russian) is featured in each program. Concerts by singers in the early music, oratorio, and chamber ensemble program feature thematic programs for vocal ensembles and soloists.
Other Local Performing Groups
These include Orchestra New England, the New Haven Civic Orchestra, the Yale Russian Chorus, the Slavic Chorus, the Bach Society, the Collegium Musicum, the New Haven Oratorio Chorus, and the New Haven Chorale.
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra, the nation’s fourth-oldest orchestra, offers a series of concerts every year in Woolsey Hall and features leading artists as guest soloists.
