Preparing for Puccini

The choir assembles in Dore Abbey to perform their run-through of Puccini's Messa di Gloria, which they had been working on in a one-day workshop today. It was a remarkably good performance, particularly considering most of them had never sung a note of it before today.

Dore Abbey was a huge Cistercian abbey founded in the 12th century and dissolved in 1536 with Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. Much of it was then dismantled for the stone, leaving only the south and north transepts and the "business end" of the church. Of the nave, cloisters and other monastic buildings, only a few bits of ruined wall remain. Now it is used as a parish church, but the scale is grand.