Second Sunday in Advent

We received an e-mail late last night from our church organist Tom, to say that choir was cancelled for the morning, since Michael, our director was ill, and wouldn’t be in church. We weren’t well prepared for this morning’s anthem, and were counting on 30 minutes this morning to bring it together, but since Tom was already involved in several other parts of the service, he didn’t have the time to work with us, so it was felt best to cancel choir, and rearrange a couple of other items. This left us with some extra time to have a little lie-in! Tom, who is also a cellist, was performing a lovely piece with Patti at the piano and his daughter Gretchen singing. I hadn’t heard her sing before, and she always comes over as fairly quiet, but she did a great job. This was originally to have been the prelude, so instead, he came up with another piece on the organ for the prelude, and they played the other piece in the anthem spot, and I thought it was much nicer than our anthem anyway! His family were also lighting the advent wreath this morning, so they had a busy morning. Furthermore, Tom’s day wasn’t over when church was over, as he was playing his cello with the Vocal arts Ensembles performance of the entire Handel’s Messiah down at Christ church Cathedral downtown, which we were also going to. It’s a select choir of 16 professional singers, with a string orchestra, harpsichord, timpani and trumpet. We went last year, and it was a great performance, ,so returned this year. They don’t have separate soloists, they each take one or more of the solo arias and recitatives. The Messiah holds such a special place in my heart, having been introduced to it at quite an early age, and the season doesn’t seem complete to me if I don’t see or participate in a performance of the Messiah. There was a sing- along performance we could have gone to last weekend at another downtown church, but Roger didn’t have much of a voice at the time, so we gave it a miss, and got tickets for this instead. It’s quite a large church, and it was totally sold out.