‘Songs of Protest and Hope” was the title Ex Cathedra had given to their Remembrance Sunday programme of choral music, conducted by Jeffrey Skidmore. Two of the works included, by Sally Beamish and Alec Roth, were brand new, the others, by James MacMillan and John Joubert, dated back to the 1980s, and all of them were delivered with impressive assurance by the 30-strong group.
Yet it was the older rather than the newer music that left the stronger impression. More than 30 years on, MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados remains one of his most powerful pieces, composed at a time when he was interested in the liberation theology of Latin America, an interest that had already resulted in his impressive Busqueda. Cantos Sagrados seems like an impassioned codicil to that music-theatre work – juxtaposing settings of poems by Ariel Dorfman and Ana Maria Mendoza, with passages from the Latin liturgy.
