Forty years a choirmaster
Birmingham’s Ex Cathedra is celebrating a landmark with new recordings. Terry Grimley talks to its founder.
Jeffrey Skidmore still looks remarkably youthful for the founder of a choir which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this season. But then he started early, having actually launched the group when he was still at school in his native Birmingham.
He recalls: “I was a lay clerk at Birmingham Cathedral in the sixth form. I was a male alto and enjoyed early music – Renaissance and medieval music – and thought I wanted to do more of it.
“So I got some singers together at St Francis, Bournville, where I was a chorister, and did some Renaissance music.
“David Wulstan, at Magdalen College in Oxford, had a group called The Clerkes of Oxenford, who were the best group of that time. I remember writing to him, saying I’d started my own group called Ex Cathedra.”
Soon Jeffrey was inducted into the Oxford musical tradition as a student. But instead of following the more obvious career path to London, he returned to Birmingham, where for more than 20 years he combined Ex Cathedra with a teaching career.
Strangely enough, if things had turned out a little differently he might have ended up making a contribution to the early music movement in the United States.
He explains: “My parents emigrated to America when I was doing my O-levels. I actually went to see them off on the day I was doing my maths O-level. Then I joined them but I didn’t like it and came back. I would have liked to have had two lives and stayed to see what happened.”
What actually happened was that Skidmore dug in for the long haul, gradually building Ex Cathedra’s reputation, initially as an outstanding amateur choir. A crowning achievement of this early period was winning the BBC’s long-running national competition for amateur groups, Let the People Sing.
The group blazed a trail in the West Midlands for authentic performance of mainly baroque music, adding its own orchestra using authentic instruments. Members of the choir stepped forward to take solo roles, and the group established a tradition of nurturing young talent.
A number of former members, such as Nigel Short, Paul Agnew, Carolyn Sampson and James Gilchrist, have gone on to achieve national and international reputations.
Ex Cathedra’s annual Christmas Music by Candlelight concerts at St Paul’s in the Jewellery Quarter were a local institution by the early 1980s, when their repertoire featured in the group’s first relatively low-key LP recordings.
Since Jeffrey gave up the teaching job in 1994 to concentrate full-time on Ex Cathedra, the group’s reputation has grown by leaps and bounds, with appearances at international festivals and a lengthening catalogue of CDs on ASV and Hyperion, as well as Ex Cathedra’s own label. The three Hyperion CDs, exploring the little-known field of Latin American baroque music, proved a particular success and Classic FM favourite.
Ambitious plans to celebrate the 40th anniversary over a three-year period, first announced last year, are now well underway but proving to be somewhat fluid.
A new commission from Fyfe Hutchins, originally planned for this year, has been put back to 2011, while plans to record music by John Joubert, with whom the group has a long association, are on hold for the moment.
On the other hand, an opportunity arose to make a live recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which is due out this month from Orchid Classics, the artist-led label launched by violinist Matthew Trusler in 2005. The label will also release the group’s latest collection of Christmas music in November.
This year’s Christmas Music By Candlelight concerts will include the premiere of a new piece by James MacMillan, who has also promised a more substantial work to follow.
In January the 40th anniversary is marked by a programme devoted to compositions in 40 parts, beginning with Thomas Tallis’s famous Spem In Alium and including a new piece specially written for the occasion by Alec Roth.
“We have a backlog of recordings,” Skidmore says. “As well as the Bach and Christmas CDs we’ve recorded the Lassus St Matthew Passion – a very austere piece – for the Somm label. We also have a recording of Elijah and we still don’t know what to do with that.”
This recording of Mendelssohn’s great oratorio was made by the BBC at the Town Hall last October when Ex Cathedra gave the first performance of the original 1846 version since its premiere in the same venue, in partnership with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment using authentic instruments of the time (including the world’s only contrabass ophicleide).
Asked if he would have any reservations about releasing this live recording, Jeffrey says: “Absolutely not. There are one or two footsteps, but that’s all. We can clean it up quite a bit.”
Elijah was the middle one of three landmark events spanning the 40th anniversary celebrations. The first was the 1784 version of Messiah, and the third will be November’s two performance of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, also in the Town Hall and also with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – bringing the early music movement right up to 1900.
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of research and listening to old recordings which Elgar conducted in 1927. Nobody gets close to what Elgar was aiming to do. He had this very free, sensuous attitude to music-making. He would start at a particular speed and speed up when he got excited – it was very natural.”
“It wasn’t until 1945 that Sargent did the first complete recording, and already the instrumental playing style had changed. The horns of the period have a much narrower bore and make a very delicate sound. Trombones are also a narrower bore and so they are not as blasting.
“Strings are obviously going to have gut strings with portamento, and French woodwind instruments make a softer sound. It will be quite a different sound.
“And on top of that we have our amazing chorus, with an age range from 11 up to 69. I auditioned them all recently to see how they’re getting on, and there’s one 15 year-old who sounds like Kathleen Ferrier.”
* Ex Cathedra launches its 2009-10 season at The Oratory, Hagley Road, tomorrow night with A New Heaven, a programme of religious music spanning 1,000 years (box office: 0121 780 3333). For full details of the season visit www.excathedra.co.uk.
