Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | English | Martha McLorinan

Though musically flawed, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s choral work The Atonement is given a superb performance at the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford Cathedral. 

Well defined performances of Monteverdi madrigals are sung with I Fagiolini’s customary ease and involvement. 

Enhanced by bells, Ex Cathedra Jeffrey Skidmore give a low-key but highly dramatic performance of Rachmaninov’s Vespers in Birmingham Town Hall

Adrian Partington and the Philharmonia give an impersonal, soporific rendition of Elgar's The Apostles at Gloucester Cathedral. 

Bradley Smith, as Evangelist, and a fine cast of soloists drove this Good Friday account of Bach’s St Matthew Passion from Ex Cathedra in Birmingham.

An exquisite evening of British 20th-century choral music from Tenebrae under Nigel Short at the Sydney Festival, with outstanding renditions of the music of Parry, Bingham and Stanford.

Sir Roger Norrington and a strong cast joined a Baroque-style London Philharmonic Orchestra in a highly accomplished Dido and Aeneas, preceded by Handel’s clean and stately Water Music.

It was unfair to pair the exquisite madrigals and songs of Barbara Strozzi with a weighty piece by Monteverdi.

In performing the Vespers in the acoustically wonderful Milton Court, Jeffrey Skidmore took the imaginative decision to interleaving its movements with solo piano works, played by Steven Osborne. It proved inspirational programming.

Ex Cathedra's Chorus in fine voice for a "small scale" Messiah in Birmingham. 

Any venue, cathedral or concert hall, that advertises a Good Friday performance of J.S. Bach’s epic St Matthew Passion is likely to sell out; even Birmingham’s vast Symphony Hall is no exception, today being full to bursting with eager parishioners making their annual pilgrimage to wallow in Bach’s all-consuming musical ministry.