The Fairfield University Glee Club performs Mozart and Bernstein at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts | Press Releases

The Fairfield University Glee Club presents "The Magic of the Masters," an interesting program of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Leonard Bernstein, on Saturday, April 22, at 7:30 p.m. in the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. The program will celebrate the Quick Center's Leonard Bernstein Festival and commemorate Mozart's 250th birthday year.

Under the direction of Carole Ann Maxwell, D.S.M., the concert offers a peek at two composers whose music defined their eras. The Glee Club will give examples of Mozart's mastery of 18th-century Classical style with his exquisite miniature choral motets "Ave Verum Corpus, K. 618" and "Regina Coeli, K. 276."

The concert also features Bernstein's incidental choral music for "The Lark," a 20 ^th -century theater collaboration with American playwright Lillian Hellman. The piece, a drama about the trial of Joan of Arc, is deliberately evocative of the saint's medieval era. The program also features Bernstein's "Simple Song" from "Mass," as well as works by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Ivan Erod, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Marvin Curtis and Claude Le Jeune.

The Glee Club is a mixed chorus of more than 90 undergraduate and graduate students continuing a 59-year legacy of musical excellence on campus and abroad. The choir has performed at Carnegie Hall, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., Westminster Cathedral in London, the Aula Paolo VI at the Vatican and the U.S. Military academies at West Point and Annapolis. The Quick Center appearance comes just weeks after the touring choir finished a memorable European tour with stops in Florence and Rome, Italy.

The full Glee Club will perform, as well as the smaller ensembles Sweet Harmony, Men's Ensemble, The Chamber Singers and the Sine Nomine Singers.

Dr. Maxwell, director of Choral and Liturgical Music for Fairfield University since 1980, is also the artistic director and conductor of The Mendelssohn Choir of Connecticut and chorus master of The Greater Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra. She has conducted choruses for the Prague Radio Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Philadelphia Lyric Opera Orchestra, the Connecticut Grand Opera and Orchestra and the Yale Opera Ensemble.

She has shared the stage with jazz icon Dave Brubeck and the Dave Brubeck Quartet, opera legends Sherrill Milnes, Marilyn Horne and Renee Fleming, and composers Stephen Schwarz, Stephen Sondheim and Charles Strouse. For the second year, she has been named one of the distinguished conductors at the celebrated "Messiah Sing-In" at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tickets are $10, $6 for students. For tickets, call the Quick Center box office at 203-254-4010 or toll free at 1-877-ARTS-396. For more information, visit www.quickcenter.com .