Hyperion Records

Jeffrey Skidmore is one of the United Kingdom’s foremost choral conductors and is highly regarded by instrumentalists, singers and audiences for the high quality of his performances. He is well known for exciting programming which is often challenging but always accessible. Jeffrey read music at Magdalen College, Oxford, before returning to his native Birmingham to develop Ex Cathedra into the internationally acclaimed choral group it has become.

Directing Ex Cathedra and its associated Baroque Orchestra and Consort, Jeffrey has appeared in concert series and festivals across the UK and abroad and made more than a dozen recordings. In recent years he has commissioned more than ten new works and conducted many premieres by both well-established composers and new young talent, including Fyfe Hutchins, Gabriel Jackson, John Joubert, James MacMillan, Daryl Runswick, Peter Sculthorpe, Philip Sheppard, Alec Roth, Peter Wiegold and Roderick Williams.

In the field of opera he has worked with Marc Minkowski and David McVicker on the production of Semele at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, and conducted La Calisto, Dido and Aeneas, Pygmalion and The Fairy Queen at Birmingham Conservatoire. With Ex Cathedra he gave the first performances in modern times of the French Baroque operas Zaïde by Royer and Isis by Lully.

Jeffrey is a pioneer in the field of research and the performance of neglected choral works of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and has won acclaim in particular for his recordings of French and Latin American Baroque music on Hyperion. An Honorary Fellow at Birmingham Conservatoire and a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, he has prepared new performing editions of works by Araujo, Charpentier, Lalande, Monteverdi and Rameau.

Jeffrey is Artistic Director of the Early Music Programme at Birmingham Conservatoire and Director of Ex Cathedra’s wide-reaching education programme. He frequently gives choral training workshops and teaches at summer schools in the UK and overseas. He regularly directs the choral programme at Dartington International Summer School and was Classical Music Programmer for the 2005 Kilkenny Festival. In August 2008 he was Session Presenter at the Association of British Choral Directors’ Convention in Lincoln. Jeffrey is regularly invited to conduct other ensembles, most recently The Irish Baroque Orchestra in three performances of Messiah in Dublin, Cork and Galway.