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The Concerts in the Chapel
Photo by Tony Rinaldo
One of the cultural amenities of life on the HBS campus is the availability of free music concerts in the Class of 1959 Chapel. Designed by Moshe Safdie in 1992, the chapel and its adjoining clock tower were funded by members of the MBA Class of 1959. After it was built, Dean John McArthur, a member of that class, suggested holding a series of concerts in the chapel to increase its use and persuaded Arthur Rishi, a 1990 graduate of Harvard College, to organize them.
Each year since 1993, Rishi has arranged a series of 8–15 concerts, mostly during the school year, presenting an unusual variety of music and, on one occasion, dance. Given its concrete interior surfaces, the chapel space is quite reverberant, so foam padding on the walls was added, Rishi notes, at the suggestion of Yo-Yo Ma, the Harvard-educated cellist, to reduce the echo. The venue holds 90 people comfortably (50–60 when performers are added), so most concerts involve small, chamber-music groups or soloists with keyboard accompaniment. (A piano, harpsichord, and chamber organ are part of the chapel’s equipment.) But operas — Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw and Vaughan Williams’s Riders to the Sea — have been staged in the chapel, and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was played there too, albeit in an arrangement for only flute, violin, cello, and piano.
Composers whose works have been heard in the chapel range from the 16th-century Renaissance master Josquin des Pres and the 17th-century Baroque composer Henry Purcell to 20th-century figures like Olivier Messaien (Quartet for the End of Time) and two Boston-area composers, John Harbison and Daniel Pinkham. who wrote a concerto for organ and winds with the chapel’s organ in mind. Among the thematic concerts given over the years have been special interactive children’s concerts demonstrating musical instruments, Music for Valentine’s Day, and music by African-American composers to celebrate Black History Month. There have also been concerts of harp music, music for theremin (whose eerie sound you’d recognize from sci-fi movie sound tracks from the 1940s and ’50s), gospel music, a duo concert by the She-E-Os and Heard on the Street (HBS’s own student a capella groups), and jazz.
Rishi recalls no concert catastrophes more serious than a tenor being delayed in winter traffic and a piano accompanist smashing a finger in the piano bench, and he’s proudest of having persuaded several famous performers to come to the chapel: Christopher Hogwood played the extremely soft-volumed clavichord surrounded by the audience in circles of chairs; Michael Chance, a countertenor, sang Franz Schubert’s song cycle Die Winterreise transposed up an octave; and Dave Brubeck played jazz piano for 35 minutes, not a one of them “Take Five.”
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