Today, I was invited to be the soprano soloist at the Princeton Society of Musical Amateurs’ performance of Joseph Haydn’s Theresienmesse on April 5th. This piece has a lot of work for the soprano soloist (yay!). However, the soprano doesn’t just go flying alone, singing a bunch of arias like the big diva she might think she is. Instead, she’s part of a quartet of soloists that sings passages interspersed with the full chorus, with a chamber-chorus sort of effect. Each soloist gets a moment to shine alone here and there, but largely it is the united solo quartet that is the mass’s “soloist.”

I’ve never done the Theresienmesse, so I’ve got a lot of notes to learn in the next couple of weeks. But I can already tell that it’s going to be fun!

Haydn’s Theresienmesse
Princeton Society for Musical Amateurs
4pm, Sunday, April 5th, 2009
Princeton Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Rt 206 at Cherry Hill Road, Princeton, NJ