“From Handel’s Zadok to Haydn’s Creation, joyous Bach and a capella Mozart, there was a feast of peerless music-making in the kind of living, breathing choral expertise that makes this group, under the titanic Jeffrey Skidmore, a global phenomenon. More, in fact, than this review of mere pedestrian words can do justice, except to focus on three works that capture some of the adventure, the startling breadth of the night, and its intense depths of spiritual experience. First up, Hanac pachap cussicuinin … simultaneously archaic and startlingly modern. We swam in its timelessness.

“My second highlight was Charpentier’s Transfige, dulcissime Jesu and, as the man said, we were transfixed. The antiphonal passages bloomed against St Chad’s curved walls with almost painful richness, the soprano sailed their lines upward as though the music itself were attempting an ascent. The harmonic language, with its characteristically Charpenterian appetite for dissonance resolved at the last possible moment, kept the ear in a state of sustained, pleasurable anxiety. It is music that understands suffering as a form of attention. Ex Cathedra rendered it with exactly that quality of focused grief.

“Finally the Allegri Miserere. A piece which perhaps lumbers under the weight of its own mythology and repeated flailings on Classic FM. But here, in its liveness, so zestily unpeeled, we had a moment to reflect it was Burney, who obtained from Rome one of the earliest reliable copies of this most jealously guarded of sacred secrets, part of his forensic effort to understand why the piece’s effect was so much greater than its architecture might suggest. Skidmore’s singers similarly delivered a masterclass in deceptive simplicities, restoring the work to the liturgical function its strophic structure implies with unhurried, plaintive sensibility. The famous top C, when it came, twice, was not a stunt but a destination: the soprano floated it in a silence so complete that one could hear the faintest sigh of the rotunda itself resettling around the note. With his unerring ear for a hit, Burney noted at the time this was a piece that would ‘ravish the soul of every era.’ And so we were…”

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