Still, with choir funding down, it makes things tough.
In the second, the Zamar Gospel choir buckled down to perform Douglas's composition Songs From the Heart.
In it he had chosen to create an opposition between soprano soloists singing very high angular lines and the rest of the choir laying down a soft carpet of continuous sound, which suited the bitter ironies of the sonnet.
Granted, Shakeri doesn't sing any of the numbers entirely solo from start to finish as Soroush did in Gianni Schicchi, but there are many brief peek-a-boo solos when the choir dims down to an almost inaudible volume.
Then Bieber descended from the rafters toward the ranks of an assembled church choir, coming down in an angel-winged harness like the contraption he's worn on tour.
One member of the choir gets down on one knee and asks another to marry him, and my usual revulsion for public proposals hides in a closet somewhere while I laugh and jump and squeal and feel absolutely certain that these two people love each other and will be together forever.
It's a quality his album 2013 captures, too: Scottish choirs lie down beside karaoke bars, Japanese buskers, orchestras, bursts of David Bowie's Rebel Rebel.
Heavier, darker, sillier and more haunting, the new album dips into oceans of blues, rockets off aboard celestial choirs, settles down into genteel guitar musings, shudders with rickety bassline generators and ex presses a hugeness of feeling in 56 varieties of robo-voice.
She studied piano from the age of five, sang in the church choir and turned down a place at the London School of Economics in order to sign her first record deal.
In more outgoing passages, there was a tendency toward shrillness, and when the choir was pared down, as it was in sections of the Poulenc and Daniel-Lesur works, the ensemble was sometimes surprisingly slack.
Because of this, a later arrangement without brass or choir, and pared down from 25 minutes to fifteen by omitting the "collage" sections and closing reprise of the main theme, remained in their live repertoire into 1972.
