A large cathedral is exactly the right place to hear large operatic-style choral works by Verdi and Puccini. But you need to throw aside any Anglican preconceptions of decorum.

For their annual end-of-year shindig, Peter Seymour led the university’s mighty musical forces - the choir sounding a little less mighty for lack of its usual high-rise seating - into Mediterranean realms unfamiliar to most of us in these hardy climes.

In what Liszt would have called the sins of his old age - Verdi was well into his eighties when he completed his Quattro Pezzi Sacri - the composer tries to sound sacred, contrary to his operatic inclinations.

Worse than that, he throws his large choir straight into an unaccompanied Ave Maria, not an easy way to kick off. It was no fault of the conductor’s that it was flaccid: the choir sounded thoroughly cautious, Anglo-Saxon indeed.

The advent of the orchestra in the Stabat Mater gradually brought new courage into choral veins. Here and in the Te Deum there were wonderfully gutsy attacks by the first sopranos. The orchestra was suitably bombastic, revelling in the volcanic eruptions at ‘Sanctus’.

But it was really only in Puccini’s Messa di Gloria, completed in his twenty-second year and ironically sounding just like his idol Verdi, that passion took over from propriety.

Peter Davoren’s Italianate tenor was just what we needed in the Gratias and Et Incarnatus. Andrew Thompson’s cathedral instincts held back his otherwise pleasing bass.

The brass were given free rein in the Gloria. The theatrical Credo was nicely balanced by the surprisingly personal, intimate Agnus Dei. In the end, we all enjoyed being Italians for an evening. All we needed were a few mortar-boards to throw in the air.