“Earlier, Ex Cathedra performed Rachmaninov’s Vespers (1915), conducted by its founder-director Jeffrey Skidmore in his last season. He has a close affinity with Rachmaninov’s sacred composition, based on Russian Orthodox chants. Skidmore’s unflagging determination, since the 1980s, to find a good performing edition has helped bring this atmospheric work to wider recognition. The magnificent fortissimos, with the choir sometimes divided into as many as 11 parts and here handling it with aplomb, rang out thrillingly in the cathedral’s slow reverberation.”

By Fiona Maddocks for The Observer. Full review here.