The sectionals in Glee look like more fun than ours

If you’re a tenor everybody wants you (chorally speaking). Tenors are a rare breed. As a tenor, you must surely feel appreciated, needed, perhaps even loved. If you miss a concert you will be abandoning your few loyal comrades in their hour of need. The rest of the choir will notice your absence, and throw uneasy glances at the space in the ranks where you should be. You make a DIFFERENCE. If you’re a soprano, however, your section stretches back to the horizon. You could get lost in the jungle for 6 months and when you emerge, staggering and traumatised, back into the choral ranks, people will throw you a glance and wonder if you’re up to date with your subs. You are part of a vast collective of strangers, tied together only by the need to chant approximately the same line. We’re like the Borg, basically. However the one real benefit of being a lady in the world of choral singing is that when we have sectionals (where we split into sections to rehearse separately), we’re too huge and amorphous a mass to move with any speed, so we get to stay in the nice bright main hall while the men have to troop off to the poky little chapel downstairs. Heh heh heh!

Sectionals this week gave us a chance to notebash some of the Puccini Messa di Gloria. It’s a really fun piece, and well-rounded with some lovely tunes. Don’t listen to The Grove Concise Dictionary of Music, which rather dismisses it with the cold one-liner - “Puccini's choral, orchestral and instrumental works, dating mainly from his early years, are unimportant, though the Mass in A-flat (1880) is still performed occasionally”. Blimey, bit harsh. Whoever wrote that had clearly not read Classical.net, which has Puccini writing the Mass in 1860, at the age of 2. That must surely raise its importance in the classical pantheon? In any case, it seems to have been well received at the time of its first performance in 1880, but then forgotten until 1952, when it was rediscovered by the portentous-sounding Father Dante and performed again in Naples to another warm reception. According to the programme notes at the start of our copies, the critics at these two performances – 72 years apart – made strikingly similar comments about the piece. Is this, as the notes hold, a demonstration of the timeless beauty and universal appeal of the Mass? Or did the critic at the second performance sleep in, miss the performance altogether and then search desperately through his newspaper back catalogue, copying the previous review verbatim and rushing it down to the editorial office bare minutes before his deadline? I guess we’ll never know.