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Sir Simon Rattle conducts 80+ members of the LSO in the monumental Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale in a site-specific performance inside – and outside – St Paul’s Cathedral.

Michael Spyres' long lyrical line in the Sanctus was outstanding, his tone ardent and ringing.

Positioned at the heart of St Paul’s Cathedral, Rutter took to the stage to perform a sold out concert dedicated to his life as a composer. 

The LSO, led by Edward Gardner, delivered a moving and profound performance of Haydn's Creation despite the acoustic challenges of St Paul's. 

Two strange bedfellows – Penderecki and Bruckner – brought together in the acoustically awkward, if architecturally spectacular surrounding of St Pauls Cathedral by Daniel Harding and the LSO as part of the City of London Festival.

On the night of 29 December, 1940, after a brief respite over Christmas, German bombers roared back over Britain. They dropped numerous incendiary bombs on the City of London, causing massive destruction, loss of life, and uncontrollable fires that raged for days. Miraculously, St Paul’s Cathedral survived the onslaught intact, even as much of the surrounding neighbourhood was reduced to rubble.

The City of London Festival this year is ambitiously programmed, with a number of common themes running through the events.

The newly built and unconventionally imposing Coventry Cathedral, built next to the ruins of the original medieval building destroyed in the Second World War, played host to the first performance of Britten’s War Requiem in 1962.

In 1993, by some strange musical alchemy, a creative partnership was born that has gone on to bear some remarkable fruit. On Officium, stylish jazz and classical label ECM brought together The Hilliard Ensemble – a vocal quartet known for the precision with which it had tackled and animated austere soundworlds from Perotin to Pärt – and Norwegian jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

To sit directly under the splendid chiaroscuro dome of St Paul's Cathedral, with angels, apostles and Christ himself glittering down from mosaiced arches, is to be in the middle of astonishing beauty.

This was the showpiece concert of this year’s City of London Festival and took place in the spectacular surroundings of St Paul’s Cathedral. Three key French composers were featured, concluding with well-known 3rd Symphony of Saint-Saëns. The first performance of this work was conducted by Saint-Saëns in London in 1886 in the long-since demolished St James’s Hall.