Santuzza wasn't missed

Santuzza is the name of my main World of Warcraft character. (That's because we were rehearsing Cavalleria Rusticana when I first bought the game, see.) Sadly, for various reasons I won't bore you with, she has been unable to make any progress recently, so I've been concentrating on Iolanthe, my main alternate character. So the sight of Santuzza's name all over the Easter Hymn made me a little wistful. However, I'm delighted to say that the performance did not suffer from having our soprano section singing the solo Santuzza line (not that I ever thought it would) - they sounded fabulous :-)

The Easter Hymn was my favourite of all the things we sang tonight, although there were several others close behind. Could have done without Jesu Joy or the Bridal Chorus, and that movement of the Brahms is OK but it's my least favourite from the whole of the Requiem, and I've gone off the Vaughan Williams somewhat. But the rest of it was great! It all went very well, too. A very long day - the rehearsal was more than 3 hours long, and then we didn't have much of a break because we had half an hour of choir photo-taking before we could have our tea. That was quite fun, though, and I look forward to seeing the results.

The audience seemed to enjoy the concert. Not as full as I'd been led to believe it might be, but a pretty good turnout. I only spotted three people who stood for Hallelujah, which was kind of disappointing. But they weren't given much warning, to be fair. Oh, and there was some weird problem with the hall's PA system, which meant that it kept emitting random noises. Very offputting, and it took them most of the concert to sort it (Jamie had to go offstage at one point, it was so bad), but they did in the end.

Not much else to say, actually. Oh, a medical update, though: for those who were asking about Liz L, she's fine but her dad is very ill and that's why she's been missing. She hopes to be back on Wednesday. Lindsay H will be missing for a while, having fallen down some stairs and ended up with a new hip. And Alison, who was very poorly on Wednesday (but came to choir anyway, the fool, although she didn't sing) turned out to have a kidney infection and is much better now it's been treated.

P.S. I missed Abi today - I wanted her to share my ongoing semi-chorus bitterness :-) (The semi-chorus had an extra member today, I noticed. Not sure why that should be. And they made a bit of a mess of that bit they kept getting wrong in April - at least in the rehearsal. They sounded fine in the concert.)

EDIT: I almost forgot the most interesting thing I learned today! It's about Jamie's Oxford Blues Service (live on R3, 4pm Wednesday). I bumped into him in Starbucks before the rehearsal this afternoon, and I asked how rehearsals were going. He told me that it's all great - they've rehearsed with the band, and in the church, but that's when they discovered that they couldn't follow their original plan of using the church organ, as it's not tuned to A=440. So they're going to take in a Hammond organ instead! I told him that's much more rock and roll :p