“At a time when so much concern is being expressed – rightly – at the lack of provision of music education in schools it’s great to find youngsters getting an opportunity like this to sing music which stretches them – in a sensible fashion – doesn’t condescend to them, and involves them in a serious large work with adult performers. This, I think, goes to the heart of Ex Cathedra’s longstanding and successful educational programme in Birmingham.” (musicwebinternational.com)
“compelling and engrossing … this magnificent musical outfit has a history ahead of it as long and distinguished as that behind” 5* review
“Ex Cathedra rang the changes at St Paul’s Church, Hockley in their Summer Music by Candlelight concert with an exciting new face at the podium. Associate Conductor, Sarah Latto has been with the choir since 2019 but this was her first time … programming a whole concert.
“The result was a thoroughly charming and engaging evening of music by candlelight that, despite being by diverse composers and drawn from a range of eras and styles, created a feeling of progression and development that took the audience on a coherent journey into the dying light…
“A first half dominated by early music allowed the choir to show off its rich and sonorous texture, with a wonderful sense of line, and variety of colour. Dynamic range was complemented by contrasts in intensity that enabled the music to pulse, flow, and really breathe. Diction was clear and crisp with some strong word painting, particularly during Palestrina’s Exultate Deo.
“After the interval, some lighter numbers acted as a bit of a palate cleanser, before we got into the mainly twentieth-century meat of the second half. This was a sequence of music that grew in emotional and harmonic complexity, richness, and depth, culminating in two pieces by Alec Roth, The Flower and Night Prayer, wrapped around a processional piece of seventh-century plainsong, Te lucis ante terminum.
“This procession took the choir back to the rear of the church, from whence they had started the evening, so they delivered the final piece of Roth under the balconies. This produced an interesting acoustic effect. Out of the sonic mixing bowl of the main church space, the individual voices became audible, creating a feeling of closeness and intimacy between performers and audience. It was quite magical and – after the journey we had travelled together – profoundly moving.
“A compelling and engrossing evening of choral singing which indicates that this magnificent musical outfit has a history ahead of it as long and distinguished as that behind.”
5*
Summer Music by Candlelight – preview
Jeffrey & Sarah talk about planning Summer Music by Candlelight
“fresh and absolutely vital” – review of Bach St Matthew Passion
“It only takes one voice: to preach, to question, to testify, to betray, to sing, to be silent. The most prominent, and poignant, aspect of Ex Cathedra’s Good Friday performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion was the telling way it highlighted the power and agency of individual voices. This is to take nothing away from the role and performance of the choir. Although Bach doesn’t give them quite the same level of raw invective as in his St John Passion, the combined forces of Ex Cathedra and the Gloucester Cathedral Youth Choir made the most of their shifting group personality, as curious bystanders, gossiping rubberneckers and a full-blown, bloodthirsty mob.
“Yet what consistently drove the narrative were the solo voices, emerging from the crowd (literally, as all the soloists were positioned within the choir) to play their brief but pivotal roles. The centrepiece of the action was the polarisation created by Bradley Smith as Evangelist and Themba Mvula as Jesus. Here was, in every sense of the word, the crux of the drama, caught between Mvula’s emphatic but fittingly inscrutable delivery of Jesus’ taciturn responses, and Smith’s wildly emotional – often deeply moving – account of the gospel narrative. Mvula, placed front and centre on stage, deserves kudos for maintaining stoic composure during the lengthy sequences where he was mute, never breaking character. Smith, though, entirely lived up to his character’s title: here was a man literally evangelising, breathlessly articulating these ancient events as if not just his own but everybody else’s life (and soul) depended on it.
“Smith and Mvula together defined the limits of the Passion’s expressive palette; every other voice fell somewhere in between. Especially interesting in this context were the other basses, both of whom offered a huge contrast to Mvula’s enigmatic approach. Thomas Lowen’s account of “Gerne will ich mich bequemen” was deeply personal, an attitude reinforced in the late-stage aria “Gebt mir meinin Jesum wieder!”, articulated as heartbroken rage: “Give my Jesus back to me!” Doubling as Pilate, Lawrence White deftly turned between authority, elegance and tenderness, at times almost stealing the show.
“There were times when the force of these protagonists almost undermined what Jeffrey Skidmore was eliciting from the orchestra. For a long time their performance sounded surprisingly mild-mannered, almost workaday, though in hindsight Skidmore may have been wanting to downplay Part 1 in order to ramp things up in Part 2. Certainly, despite a couple of hairy moments when the timing or tuning went strangely awry, the orchestra sounded more and more enmeshed with and inseparable from the vocal throng, and by the time of Pilate’s fateful final exchanges with Jesus, things had really heated up, with everyone pushing through the narrative at speed. Skidmore ensured that intimacy was always maintained though, making the accompaniment of the aria “Aus Liebe” excruciatingly delicate, soprano Margaret Lingas outdoing herself in a wonderfully heartfelt outpouring, all the more impressive considering how exposed her solo was. Alto Martha McLorinan seamlessly continued from Bradley Smith’s distressing account of Peter’s weeping with an emotionally-charged “Erbarme mich”, while second tenor James Robinson’s rendition of “Geduld!” was pure lyricism, his gorgeous voice making the text utterly compelling: “Endure!”
“Ultimately though, perhaps as it should, everything came back to Bradley Smith. This entire Passion is from the perspective of just one voice, a former tax collector turned disciple turned evangelist, who hoped to preserve for posterity events he believed should never be forgotten. In this performance Smith practically embodied Matthew, in the process ensuring that both his 2,000-year old narrative and Bach’s 300-year old music remained fresh and absolutely vital.”
Songs of Protest – Musical Opinion review
“In Birmingham Town Hall on 13 November, Ex Cathedra and conductor Jeffrey Skidmore presented a Remembrance Sunday early-evening concert entitled ‘Songs of Protest’. The programme consisted of four substantial choral pieces, two of them receiving their first performance, by composers with whom the choir has worked with over several years. Based on themes of resistance and defiance, the featured scores addressed critical issues such as illegal imprisonment, the fight against torture and repression, as well as the need for compassion and peace.
“James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados (‘Sacred Songs’), for choir and organ (1989) was a fervent, thoughtful work in which settings of poems by Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza concerned with political repression and the ‘disappearance’ of prisoners in Latin America were coupled with passages from the Latin liturgy. The composer’s interest in liberation theology had already born fruit in a music theatre work, Busqueda and Cantos Sagrados explores further the religious and political themes of that earlier piece.
“The singers captured the urgency and biting immediacy of the search for the identity of a found body in the first Dorfman setting, punctuated by organist Jonathan Hope’s crisply articulated, dissonant chords. However, the most memorable and affecting musical experience was provided by the poised, hypnotically reiterative treatment of Mendoza’s prayer to the Virgin of Guadalupe at the heart of the score. Delivered with bite and precision, the terse concluding ‘Sun Stone’, in which Dorfman presents the final words of an executioner to his victim, returned to the same unsettled, abrupt soundworld as the opening movement. The increasingly hushed closing paragraphs, where the executioner pleads for forgiveness, were movingly rendered, especially the final, heartfelt whispered entreaty.
“Commissioned by Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture, Sally Beamish’s A Knock on the Door (2021) featured a specially written, powerfully forthright text by Peter Thomson condemning torture and its malign consequences on both victim and perpetrator. The piece was scored for two choirs, percussion, electronic keyboard and a pre-recorded soundtrack containing heavy metal band music. The choirs represented the torturer and the victim and towards the end of the work, in a dramatic coup de theatre, the singers physically swapped places and exchanged roles, underlining the corrosive effect of oppression on both protagonists and the uncomfortable truth that, given certain circumstances, anyone might be forced to assume the role of oppressor or victim. To underline the unexceptional, everyday nature of the central figures, simple musical language was used, including universally recognisable elements such as jazz, blues and waltz rhythms, as well as music hall and minimalism. Peter Thomson’s text, consisting predominantly of terse exchanges between the two choirs, was uncompromisingly spare and direct, though incorporating authentic elements of dark humour and a tenacious glimmer of hope in the closing reaffirmations of the word ‘love’.
“The inclusion of impersonal keyboard rather than expressive piano was an effective touch, subtly emphasising the unsettlingly mundane ordinariness of the scenario. The heavy metal track, notated by Sally Beamish and pre-recorded by guitarist Arthur Dick, was appropriately jarring in its effect, reminding listeners of the use of loud music in acts of sleep deprivation and contrasting markedly with the sustained, intentionally restrained material used elsewhere.
“Staged with dramatic intensity in this compelling premiere reading, A Knock on the Door is an important, hard-hitting musical statement which makes its mark through unflinching concentration upon a difficult subject matter and by avoiding any lurid sensationalism. Sally Beamish’s deliberately straightforward style of writing makes it eminently suitable for enterprising non-professional choral forces. I hope the work will be taken up by other performers. It bears a crucial message that demands to be passed on.
“After the interval, we heard the very fine cantata South of the Line (1985), for soprano and baritone soloists, choir, two pianos, timpani and percussion by South African-born, Birmingham-based composer John Joubert (1927-2019). Ex Cathedra’s first commission, this setting of anti-war poems written by Thomas Hardy at the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer conflict, consisted of five contrasting scenes. Set for the whole ensemble, ‘Embarcation’ captured the sense of occasion and jubilant crowds as troops set sail for the Cape. After an imposing opening, a vigorous march emerged, curdled by acrid dissonances. With clear articulation, the choir savoured the setting’s pungent harmonies and rhythms and brought a spirit of sincere compassion to the short, visionary, unaccompanied episode ‘As if they knew not that weep the while’. Imogen Russell was the eloquent soloist in the following, aria-like ‘A Wife in London’, scored for soprano and piano only, that contrasted dense, outside fog with a husband’s letter ‘Page-full of his hoped return’. The pianos were silent during the central, cortège-like movement, in which a series of chorales underpinned by timpani strokes grieved for the unhonoured passing of ‘Drummer Hodge’. There followed another solo number, this time for baritone and piano only, delivered with warmth by Lawrence White expressing the bewilderment of a soldier who has killed someone he might have shared a drink with during peacetime. In the closing setting, ‘A Christmas Ghost Story’, the atmospheric opening section evoked the expanse of the African landscape. The latter stages of the movement introduced the embittered thoughts of a dead soldier’s ghost, whose final words, ‘But tarries yet the Cause for which he died’ brought the piece to a starkly assertive conclusion. The BackBeat Percussion Quartet, timpanist Chris Bastock and pianists Jonathan French and Helen Swift provided alert and sensitive accompaniment, while choir and soloists did full justice to John Joubert’s mordant, yet graceful vocal lines, delivering a gripping, emotionally committed performance of one of the composer’s most profoundly rewarding utterances.
“The recital closed with the premiere of a work by Ex Cathedra’s composer-in-residence Alec Roth. Peace of the Night is part of an ongoing project with the German group Ensemble Nobiles for a series of five motets by different composers on texts by the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Alec Roth’s setting, for solo vocal quintet and larger choral ensemble, juxtaposes Bonhoeffer’s prayer with the words and tune of a hymn. The musicians presented the score’s diverse ingredients with meticulous care and the concluding chorale ended this thought-provoking and memorable musical event in an inspiring spirit of devotional hope.”
Paul Conway , Musical Opinion (Apr-Jun issue 2023)