The second season of the Harker Concert Series was kicked off Dec. 2 with a stirring selection of pieces by Opera San Jose. Upper school music teacher Chris Florio customarily began the proceedings by welcoming everyone to the inaugural show of the second season.
After the announcement of some changes to the concert schedule (and the introduction of the night’s accompanist, Veronika Agranov-Dafoe on piano, who provided great backing to the singers throughout the concert) by Opera San Jose’s artistic director Matthew Siek, the show began with mezzo-soprano Betany Coffland, soprano Jasmina Halimic and tenor Alexander Boyer performing a section from Mozart’s “Idomeneo,” a retelling of the saga of Idomeneus, who led the armies of Crete in the Trojan War. The singers’ wonderful dramatic interpretation, in addition to their stellar interplay and vocal abilities, were more than enough to keep both opera newcomers and aficionados entertained.
OSJ’s first set was fairly diverse, due in some part to an unexpected absence by bass-baritone Isaiah Musik-Ayala, who was slated to sing “Suoni la tromba” with baritone Evan Brummel. In his place, Michael Dailey injected a little Broadway into the set, singing George Gerswhin’s “There’s a Boat Leaving to New York,” with all the stylistic flair expected from one of musical theater’s most beloved composers.
Boyer, bass Silas Elash and soprano Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste brought the first set to a fittingly grand close with “Alerte, Alerte” from Charles Gounod’s “Faust,” in which the three singers each gave a virtuoso performance.
During the intermission, attendees mingled in the Nichols Hall atrium, enjoying the many refreshments and snacks available, including a popular chocolate fountain.
“I think it’s very welcoming,” said Anne Stauffer, a first-time attendee of the Harker Concert Series of the atmosphere of the event. She added that it offered “the ability to start talking with people and engaging in conversation.”
“I think this is a wonderful thing for Harker to do,” said Debra Edginton. “I think it’s a way for Harker to blend with the community, which I think is very important. And it’s also a boost and a boon for the arts.”
Dailey and Brummel opened the second set with Gaetano Donizetti’s “Venti scudi,” from Donizetti’s opera “L’Elisir d’Amore.” Dailey, who earlier had sung Broadway, had no trouble switching gears to opera, convincingly portraying the love-stricken peasant Nemorino, as Brummel faithfully recreated the pompous swagger of Sergeant Belcore.
Coffland later returned to the stage to give one of the evening’s most impressive solo performances, singing the aria “Una voce poco fa” (“A voice a little while ago”) from Gioachino Rossini’s “Il barbiere si Siviglia,” better known as “The Barber of Seville.” Handling the song’s many challenging passages with confidence and grace, Coffland enjoyed an enthusiastic reaction from the crowd.
For the finale, all of the evening’s singers gathered onstage to sing “Libiamo ne’lieti calici,” from Giuseppe Verdi’s famous “La Traviata.” Their infectious delight in performing one of opera’s most widely known pieces drew a lengthy, well-deserved standing ovation from the audience.
The project teams for the Harker Influenza Project were announced at a special school meeting in November. The teams, each led by a grade 11 student, will undertake a project related to the spread of viral disease around campus.
The first project, led by Michael Cheng, will be to develop a smartphone application that will help collect data relevant to the project. The nature of the app is yet to be determined, as the students involved are being given “quite a bit of freedom to create an app that they think would enhance the project,” said Anita Chetty, science department chair. “They may come up with an app that we’re not even thinking about right now that will increase the amount of data that is collected for this project.”
Working with Cheng on the research team will be students Lynda Tang, grade 11, Vikram Sundar, grade 10, and grade 9 students Rishabh Jain and Andrew Jin. Somnath Banerjee, parent of Nila Banerjee, grade 10, will be assisting the team as a Harker mentor for this project.
The next project, led by Suchita Nety, will be to study how environmental factors on campus can assist in the spread of microbes. Because of the scope of this effort, it has been split into two parts, each with a different team and lead investigator. Ilsa Zhang will lead the team responsible for measuring the level of carbon dioxide in various rooms. Rooms with little change in CO2 levels over a 24-hour period may experience poor air circulation, making them potential breeding grounds for viruses. Shivani Gillon, Jennifer Dai and Zahreen Choudhury, all grade 10, will make up the project’s research team.
Another team, led by Andrew Luo, will examine surfaces for their potential to harbor disease-causing pathogens. Luo will work with researchers Leslie Tzeng and Trisha Jani, both grade 10. “The two [projects] together are going to give us lots of data about areas in the school where students may get sick,” Chetty said.
In order to gauge similarities and discrepancies in subjective and objective data, Indulakshmi Seeni will lead a team that will conduct surveys and measure the data against that collected by “motes” worn by volunteers taking part in the project. Students will be surveyed about things such as how many people they came in contact with, as well as when and where the contact occurred. Because the information gathered from these surveys is reliant upon the memories of those surveyed, the data will be compared with data collected by motes, which are worn by volunteers and electronically track their interactions throughout the day. Working with Seeni on this project will be Maddie Dawson and Molly Wolfe, grade 11, Divyahans Gupta, grade 10, and Anokhi Saklecha, grade 9.
Finally, Victoria Lin will lead a team of students responsible for gathering volunteers who, should they register a temperature of 100 or higher, will report to nurse Debra Nott, who will take a nasal and throat swab, which will in turn be sent to Dr. Elodie Ghedin at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. Ghedin, a MacArthur Fellow and leading virologist, will sequence the genome of the viruses, which can be used to find out which viruses exist on campus. Student researchers on this project will be grade 10 students Mabel Luo, Efrey Noten and Sandra Yin, and Vasudha Rengarajan, grade 9.
Dr. Marcel Salathe, who is conducting the study, visited Harker in early December with his colleague, Dr. Vicki Barclay. During their visit, they met and spoke with each team to give them advice on how to conduct their research and to prime them on the purpose of the project. Upper school biology teacher Kate Schafer will act as a liaison between the students and Salathe and Barclay. Schafer also worked closely with Salathe during the original study he conducted at Harker during the 2009-10 school year.
With the teams selected, the search will begin for volunteers once school resumes in early January. Chetty plans to hold a kickoff event that will include a screening of the film “Contagion.”
Dec. 16, 2011: The Harker upper school orchestra has been rigorously preparing for their fast-approaching trip to London. See the slideshow above for photos of the students and music teacher Chris Florio in practice!
The coming New Year festivities will be a very special time for the Harker Orchestra, who will perform in London during the city’s New Year celebrations. Lady Catherine Longworth, former Mayor of Westminster, and Bob Bone, executive director of London’s New Years Day parade, visited Harker’s upper school campus in October of last year to personally invite the orchestra to perform. The orchestra will will fly to London the day after Christmas along with director Chris Florio, upper school music teacher, and spend the next few days touring the city, visiting such landmarks as the Tower of London, Windsor Castle and Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace and home of William Shakespeare.
Florio will direct the orchestra’s performances at London’s Cadogan Hall on Dec. 29 and Dec. 31 as part of the “Music for London” concert series. Their performances will be among the several Festival Concerts that make up the first events of London’s 2012 Cultural Olympiad. On New Year’s Day, the orchestra will participate in the London New Year’s Day Parade, carrying the flags of the countries competing in the 2012 summer Olympic Games, for which London is the host city. The parade also marks the beginning of both Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee and London’s Olympic year.
Live streams of the orchestra’s performances will be available at the Cadogan Hall website. Viewers will be able to watch on Dec. 29th at 11:30 a.m., pacific standard time, and on Jan. 1 at 9 a.m., pacific standard time.
The London New Year’s Day Parade will also be live streamed at the parade’s official website. It will start at 12 a.m. on Jan. 1.
On Dec. 13, Harker students and InvenTeam members Prag Batra, Arihant Jain, Sachin Jain and Jay Reddy, all grade 12, visited San Jose City Hall, where they and the other members of the team were recognized for their achievement in this year’s InvenTeam initiative by being awarded a commendation from the city. The team’s project is a special generator that can harness solar power without the need for pricey solar panels. In October, the team was awarded a grant of $9,110 to see their project to completion. Impressed with the students’ accomplishment, City Councilman Pete Constant invited them and advisor Anthony Silk, upper school math teacher, to be honored at a city the Dec. 13 council meeting, where the students and Silk met Constant and San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed.
Harker’s 2012 Golf Classic will be Mon., March 5, 2012, and the outing includes some impressive add-ons for avid golfers and wine enthusiasts. Highlights include 18 holes of golf at the beautiful Stanford University Golf Course followed by wine tasting at the home of Scott and Susan McNealy.
Various packages for single players, couples, foursomes and twosomes are all available. Some packages include a wine tasting ticket so you can bring your spouse or a guest to the wine tasting event at the McNealy’s home.
Special Executive Level packages are available for couples interested in making it possible for the Harker boys and girls golf teams to participate in this special golf outing, which supports Harker’s general endowment.
Executive Level packages include extra wine tasting tickets and will support more than one member of the golf team and sponsor two golf holes. Friends of the Golf Team packages also include an extra wine tasting ticket and will support one golf team member and sponsor one hole.
Non-golfing friends who would like to attend the wine tasting can sponsor a golf team member, a teacher or coach, or a golf hole, and join the fun at the McNealy’s home following the golf, knowing your support will benefit Harker’s general endowment.
Space is limited! For more information on the packages, go to the Web page (same link) or contact Joe Rosenthal, executive director of advancement, at joer@harker.org or 408.345.9266.
The Harker Concert Series is proud to present jazz pianist Gerald Clayton, recently nominated for his third Grammy award, who will perform with his Gerald Clayton Trio on Fri., Jan. 20, 2012 at 8 p.m. at the Harker upper school campus’ Nichols Hall auditorium. Born in the Netherlands and raised in Los Angeles, Clayton, 27, has become one of the most recognizable young talents in modern jazz, performing with masters such as Lewis Nash, Al Foster and Clark Terry.
Clayton, who has played to acclaim in the U.S. and Europe, has also received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and DownBeat magazine, and in 2008 was recognized by the readers of DownBeat as one of the top emerging talents in jazz piano. His compositions have been performed by New York City’s Jazz Gallery and the BBC Orchestra.
He netted his first Grammy nominations in 2010 with a composition titled “Battle Circle.” The album on which it appeared, The Clayton Brothers’ release “The New Song and Dance,” which featured his father, John Clayton, on bass, was nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album, making the young Gerald a two-time nominee. His latest album, “Bond: The Paris Sessions,” was recently nominated for a Grammy award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album. Recorded in Paris, “Bond” finds Clayton and his band exhibiting what he calls “a new level of chemistry.”
Tickets for this event are available for $20 and can be purchased through the Harker Concert Series website. A pre-event reception will start at 7 p.m., and hors d’oeuvres and beverages will be available. For more information, please contact communications@harker.org.
Grade 6 students traveled to Yosemite in late October for a chance to see and hike through one of the world’s most famous and scenic national parks. Thanks to the clear weather, the students were able to enjoy the park’s natural beauty with little interruption. Clear skies gave way to a wonderful view of the Milky Way, and the travelers were greeted during their many hikes with brisk, fresh air.
Landmarks visited during the trip included the Spider Caves, Vernal Falls, Yosemite Falls and Glacier Point. It was also a bittersweet trip for some, as the students met with and bid goodbye to their Tamagawa buddies, who they will see in the spring when they visit Japan.
“I read dozens of scripts each year to find one that is a good fit for the middle school,” said Monica Colletti, a middle school performing arts teacher at The Harker School. She directs the fall play, and finding the perfect fit is a long process. “When researching this year’s show, I had heard that David Mamet, a Pulitzer prize-winning playwright, had written a play for younger audiences.”
The show ended up being this year’s hilarious, lively play. “The Revenge of the Space Pandas,” is a sci-fi spoof that centers around two kids, Binky Rudich (Akhil Arun, grade 6) and Vivian Mooster (Amrita Singh, grade 7), along with Binky’s pet sheep, Bob (Maxwell Woehrmann, grade 6). In the play, Binky invents a two-speed clock, which slows time and allows them to spin off Earth and onto the planet Goolagong, which is ruled by Georgina Topax (Chandler Nelson, grade 8) and guarded by giant space pandas.
Casting started in early September, and Colletti remembers exactly what drew her to pick the main characters. Arun had a naturally curious and innocent quality that she wanted for the character Binky. Singh, she remembers, had an attractive “high energy and youthful spirit in the auditions.” Woehrmann, who plays a very civilized, nearly human sheep, was picked nearly right away. “As soon as I saw him, I thought he would make a great Bob.”
The cast list was posted about a week later, and they jumped right into rehearsals, which presented fun challenges not just for the cast, but for the crew as well. On the planet Goolagong, people are executed by having a giant pumpkin dropped onto them. Danny Dunn, the technical director at the lower school, came in to assist the tech crew in creating a three-foot tall, four-foot wide, extremely light pumpkin.
Colletti said one thing in particular also helped everyone find his or her voice. “The kids really seemed to come into their characters as soon as we had the costumes,” she said.
With all the pieces in place, the cast put on a truly fun, high energy, out-of-this-world show that took them for rescuing a kidnapped sheep to landing in space prison. They not only got to perform it for family and friends, but also got to go to lower school, and perform it for the students there.
Colletti said she ended up having a lot of favorites with this show, but nothing could compare to the feeling of watching the closing performance. “Up to that point,” she said, “I [was] still taking notes and making suggestions to the actors. But during that last performance I ha[d] the opportunity to watch a really fun play starring the kids I’ve had the chance to get to know really well. I love[d] that.”
With the holiday season gearing up, Santana Row, a popular San Jose shopping center, had their annual tree lighting ceremony, and The Harker School was once again invited to perform for the occasion. Harker has performed at this event for the last several years, and this year they were joined by choirs from Willow Glen High School and dance teams from Lincoln High School as part of the pre-show entertainment. The schools were followed by performances by two current pop singers and the actual lighting of the tree, which was moved this year from the plaza in front of Maggiano’s to the center of the Row next to the chess board.
Harker students from the lower school through the upper school got on stage at 5:30 p.m., performing seven numbers for the crowd that gathered. Downbeat, the upper school show choir directed by Laura Lang-Ree and Catherine Snider, kicked things off with a performance of “The Joint is Jumpin’.” They also performed “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” in the middle of the show, and closed things out with a rendition of “I’ve Got the Music in Me.” High Voltage, the middle school boys dance ensemble directed by Karl Kuehn, took the second number in the show, performing to “Smooth Criminal.” Dance Fusion, a dance ensemble with students from grades 4-6 directed by Gail Palmer, followed, and chose “Working Day and Night for Christmas” as their number. The upper school JV Dance Troupe, directed by Amalia de la Rosa, was also there, and performed “Party Rockin’ in the House Tonight for Santa.” Finally, Showstoppers, the middle school girls dance ensemble directed by Rachelle Ellis, rounded out the holiday spirit with the second-to-last song of the night, a lively rendition of “Jingle Bells.”
“All our groups introduced themselves as from The Harker School, and very sweetly told what their performance group was about – nice touch,” said Lang-Ree. She also mentioned that the location and staging was well done, allowing the enormous crowd plenty of room to watch the show. Overall, she said, it was a “huge hit.”
In early November, students Patrick Lin and Ashwath Thirumalai, both grade 9, traveled to Beijing, China, to participate in the World Mathematics Team Championship (WMTC) as members of the U.S. team, which took third place in the middle division. Both students also won individual silver medals for their outstanding performances. Lin and Thirumalai competed in the middle school division due to the competition’s age requirements. Lin was invited to the WMTC by the Berkeley Math Circle, a program for Bay Area high school and middle school students that helps foster youth interest in mathematics and prepares them for contests such as the WMTC.