Ex Cathedra, at Birmingham Town Hall

Jan 25 2009 By Norman Stinchcombe

This concert, called Faith in the city: Expressions of Belief, brought together sacred music written in the Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions.

It began with Abdul Salam Kheir’s voice echoing impressively around the hall in a traditional Arabic prayer to God and spanned the centuries to end with the Agnus Dei from the Scottish Catholic composer James MacMillan’s Mass which was written for the Millennium celebrations.

While I applaud the diversity of the programme, and the uniformly excellent performances, the decision to interpolate other music between the movements of both MacMillan’s work and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms struck me as musically insensitive.

The Arabic songs from Kheir, accompanying himself on oud, a form of lute, and with percussionist Simone Rebello, were plaintive and joyful – why make them the filling in a musical sandwich?

There was much to enjoy from the choir, under conductor Jeffrey Skidmore, especially Bernstein’s work, sung in Hebrew and with the singers augmented by organ, harp and percussion.

Their performance captured its mercurial moods, hushed and meditative, brash, exuberant and serene in turn, and it was crowned by some beautiful soaring vocal lines from counter-tenor Matthew Venner.

It was matched by a haunting and rapt performance from this virtuoso choir of Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, a vocal transcription of his Adagio for Strings. MacMillan’s Mass, sung in English, is grand, austere and vocally demanding.

This was a fine performance but its cumulative drama was vitiated by interrupting it with the anglicised Hinduism of Holst’s Hymn to Vena and Schubert’s setting of Psalm 92, in Hebrew, fascinating musical rarities though they are.

Imaginative programming is always welcome but not when it’s in danger of becoming a musical pick-and-mix.