Friday evening was the big performance of the first two parts of Joseph Hadyn's oratorio The Creation. The piece actually has three parts to it, but the first two amount to almost two hours of music so the third part was cut.

We sang well enough. The Creation is a real screamer though -- the choir has about 10 measures of relatively quiet music early on and then it's pretty much bombastic declaration and fugues the rest of the way. We only sing a total of about 30 minutes, with the rest of the time taken by three soloists (the tenor was the best in our case), so we're either standing a lot or sitting a lot. And the lights -- H-O-T. Our choir conductor hired a very small orchestra (musicians are expensive), many of them UOP students or faculty, and they were very good. The harpsichordist was a little wacky though. He's about a billion years old and has been apart of the UOP community forever apparently. He played fine, but he didn't really bother to look over at the conductor a lot of the time and so was either late or early with many entrances. It was funny to notice the conductor scowling in his general direction and I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd walked over and simply told the guy to stop playing. Not a big deal though. Overall, it was an enjoyable time and I've still got a couple of the themes running through my head. I suppose I will now buy a recording of the piece so I can hear the whole thing.