Like most scholas around the country, we have spent months in preparation for Holy Week. We took on our biggest challenge to date: Miserere by Allegri. It is such a wonderful piece, and very famous for being the exclusive possession of the Sistine Chapel until Mozart himself copied it out and released it from memory. We are not singing it in two choirs but just one. It is an incredibly difficult piece to keep together. We’ve had to live with it for months before the text began to flow well.

And yet, now we must look to Easter. We are especially enjoying this vigorous arrangement of O Filii et Filiae, by Jeffrey Ostrowski. The tempo is a medium fast two. It is the sort of piece that makes you rethink the entire song. Also new for us this year is Di Lasso’s Jubilate Deo.

Next year, our hope is that the Passion chants will be sung. They are quite difficult, and we just didn’t have the time to put it all together this year. But this is part of the joy of our work: the ideal is ever present and ever elusive.