"What I saw that evening were young men in the act of expressing themselves through an art-form, energized to the fullness of their powers. You were all alive and vibrant to the roots of your beings. The air tingled. Everything in you that is most gracious and beautiful, from religious worship to the laughter of high animal spirits, was set flowing. It flowed through you into the audience and sent us home happy and invigorated."
--Lucien Price, Amphion's Lyre
Associate Conductor
Kevin Leong is in his eighth season as Associate Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Choruses. Along with directing the 180-voice Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus, he co-conducts the Harvard Glee Club, the Radcliffe Choral Society, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum. Dr. Leong has worked with the Harvard choruses over the past fifteen years, having served as Acting Conductor of the Harvard Glee Club, Assistant Conductor of the Harvard Glee Club and the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, and Conductor of the Harvard Glee Club Alumni Chorus. (The Harvard choral groups were featured in the September/October 2006 issue of Choir & Organ magazine.)
Dr. Leong has conducted various Harvard ensembles in many performances around the United States and abroad. He has recently toured with the Harvard Glee Club to Texas, the American Upper Midwest, Ireland, and Central Europe; with the Radcliffe Choral Society to the American Eastern Seaboard and London; and with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum to Australia. As Resident Conductor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra in the spring of 2003, he led that group in a performance of Brahms’s Double Concerto for Violin and Cello and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.
Dr. Leong’s teaching interests include presenting a wide repertoire to students, community singers, and audiences alike. This season’s activities include performances of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (a collaboration with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston) and Schubert’s Mass in A-flat with the Harvard-Radcliffe Chorus, a fall concert of madrigals and motets with the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum, a Christmas concert and January tour to Philadelphia with the Harvard Glee Club, and a spring concert with the Radcliffe Choral Society. As a choral clinician, Dr. Leong also routinely works with high school ensembles from the United States and Canada.
Dr. Leong earned a doctoral degree in Choral Conducting from Boston University, where he studied with Ann Howard Jones, David Hoose, Craig Smith, and Jeremy Yudkin. His dissertation, entitled “The Hymn Settings of Ludwig Senfl’s Liber vesperarum festorum solennium, D-Mbs Mus. Ms. 52,” is the 2008 winner of the Julius Herford Prize, awarded nationally each year by the American Choral Directors Association for the outstanding doctoral thesis in choral music. At Harvard University, where he graduated with a Ph.D. in Biophysics, he worked closely with Jameson Marvin for many years and currently serves as Associate in Music at Adams House. Dr. Leong has taught undergraduate courses in choral conducting at both Harvard and Boston University and has earned several teaching awards. He is a graduate of Princeton University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering and directed the Princeton Katzenjammers. Dr. Leong has studied voice with Martha Elliott and performs regularly as a tenor with numerous choral ensembles in the Boston area. He appears with the Choir of the Church of the Advent on the Arsis label. Dr. Leong is a native of suburban Philadelphia.
