Jeffrey Skidmore, founder of the Ex Cathedra choir, is not one for playing it safe. Christopher Morley spoke to him about repertoire.
I have often observed that Jeffrey Skidmore, director of the renowned chamber choir Ex Cathedra, must have a portrait of himself in the loft, ageing while he remains youthful, scarcely changing from when I first met him more than 30 years ago.
He will shortly reach his 60th birthday, and Saturday’s concert from the choir he formed during his late teens celebrates that milestone. Over a drink in a comfortable hostelry on Bearwood’s Hagley Road he told me how Ex Cathedra came into existence.
“I was an alto singer at Birmingham Cathedral and loved Renaissance music. We weren’t doing very much at that time, although it was a great choir with Roy Massey as its director, a fantastic choir. So I just got a few friends together to do Renaissance music. That’s the official story, anyway.
“I’d been a chorister at St Francis’ Church in Bournville, but emigrated with my parents to America. Then I came back on my own, and I got this Lay Clerkship at the cathedral.
“It was a mixture of people I’d known at St Francis’ and much older Lay Clerks at Birmingham.”
Amazingly, with Ex Cathedra now comfortably into its fifth decade, some of the original members are still among its ranks, as Jeffrey explains.
“Jim Clulee is still singing with the choir. I went to school with him, and he was a chorister at Bournville, and he was a founder-member of Ex Cathedra. There are other people who’ve been there 30 years, 25 years. Yet there’s still quite a big turnover, quite a young-feeling group.
“This concert on Saturday is not only about celebrating my birthday, and not only about celebrating the range of the group – we’ve got the chamber choir, the consort, vocal tutors’ ensemble, the academy (the young singers we’re training up), and the XL anniversary choir, with people coming back to join us – so that gives me the opportunity of performing this great music.
“Schoenberg, Strauss, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel and then Daniel-Lesur. It’s just an amazing programme.
“That’s what we’re trying to offer to our audience in Birmingham, which has been growing enormously in recent years since we’ve been back at Birmingham Town Hall as artists-in-association.
“We’ve had sellouts at Monteverdi Vespers, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, sellout for Tallis’ Spem in Alium.
“The audiences are there for the iconic pieces, if you like, but still when we do something slightly unusual, even when it’s a great programme when everyone who’s been there has loved it, it’s harder to sell.
“There’s a danger with this one; I mean, the audience are out there, and they grow to trust us, but you put on Schoenberg and they think ‘yahhhhh’!
