The Manhattan High choirs performed in their first concert since March 2020 on Thursday. The concert was performed in masks.

“It’s surprisingly nerve wracking,” choir director Chad Pape said. “Like there’s no sense that anybody has ever done this before or knows what they’re doing.”

For many students, this is a new experience after last year.

“There’s no inherited knowledge from the previous year and the Pops groups that sang tonight,” Pape said. “There are no veterans in that group, everybody in that group is in it for the first time because we didn’t have it last year.”

For the freshmen and sophomores, this is their first concert of high school.

“It’s much better than last year and I feel like I’ve actually made progress,” sophomore Gabrielle Herzog said.

Pape also experienced a sense of inexperience with this concert.

“It’s weird because this is my 16th year of teaching high school choir and tonight,…I thought ‘this feels like my first concert’,” Pape said.

Although Pape was nervous and anxious about how the night would go, he has a positive outlook on the experience.

“It was really weird but it was really fun,” Pape said, “like not very many people get to start their career over [in] year 16, so it was really fun.”

The concert was split into four main sections, allowing people to show up to see the students in each group as well as minimizing the number of people in the auditorium at a time.

“I think it went pretty well like we didn’t have a normal concert where like…everybody gets to go and watch,” senior Hannah Davin said. “But I think even with this staggered concert, it still went really well.”

The concert was something the choir students could be proud of.

“I’m really proud of all of us,” Herzog said. “I think we did a really good job, especially for our first performance since forever.”