Basso-profundo Glenn Miller is a resident of Michigan and has regularly performed, toured, and recorded with leading professional choral ensembles throughout the United States and Europe, including Clarion (NYC), Conspirare (Austin), Cappella Romana (Portland), the St Tikhon’s Chamber Choir (PA), the Patriarch Tikhon Choir (USA and Jerusalem), Skylark (Boston), the Choir of St Thomas Fifth Avenue (NYC), the Desert Chorale (Santa Fe), Audivi (Detroit), the Yale Schola Cantorum and the Yale Choral Artists (New Haven), the Robert Shaw Festival Singers (Atlanta and France), the Thirteen (Washington DC), Vox (Ann Arbor), the St Paul’s Cathedral Choir (London), the Oregon Bach Festival (Eugene), the Princeton University Glee Club, the Harvard University Glee Club, and the University of Chicago/Rockefeller Chapel Choir.
While his repertoire ranges from choral works from the Renaissance through recently composed works, he is especially known for his performances of Russian liturgical choral repertoire which began with singing and recording the Rachmaninoff Vespers as a member of the Robert Shaw Festival Singers. To date he has performed this work well over 100 times across the country and has made five recordings of the work, most recently in the all-male version recorded in Jerusalem by the international Patriarch Tikhon Choir (PaTRAM). He was the featured soloist on Conspirare’s recording, “The Sacred Spirit of Russia,” which was awarded a Grammy in 2014 for best choral recording, performing Chesnokov’s “Do not cast me off in my old age,” a choral concerto for basso profundo. Because of his association with the St Tikhon’s Chamber Choir and its director Benedict Sheehan, Sheehan composed the Song of Simeon movement in his larger work, Vespers, specifically for his voice, the first time a vocal concerto in English in this tradition for basso profundo has been composed. In 2018 he and two internationally regarded oktavists, Adrian Peacock (UK) and Vladimir Miller (Russia) were featured soloists with the Princeton University Glee Club, the first time these three artists had performed together.
Recent reviews about his singing with include:
It helps that Clarion has among its ranks the basso profundo Glenn Miller, who is something of a champion weightlifter among bass singers (he is even on record singing this B flat a major third lower, just for kicks.) (The New York Times)
The fifth movement was the composer’s favorite and he requested that it be performed at his funeral. It proved impossible, however, to assemble a choir capable of doing the music justice on that occasion – likely due to the lack of basses able to sing the descending scale that ends on a low B-flat at the conclusion of the piece. Glenn Miller however is one such bass. The basso profundo’s imposing voice was first heard at the very beginning of the concert but “Now lettest thou thy servant depart” afforded the opportunity to savor its true grandeur. It was not only Miller’s cavernous sound that impressed, but the depth of emotion and spaciousness that he brought to enrich the chorus’ sound. (New York Classical Review)
Perhaps the most intriguing is the Song of Simeon which is essentially a mini concerto for basso profundo (!) requiring a quite extraordinary low range (performed here by the superb Glenn Miller). (Cinemusical blog review of the Sheehan Vespers)
