The biennial St Cecilia Festival Concert, bringing together St Albans Symphony Orchestra with three local choirs in St Albans Cathedral on 14 October was musically first-class, according to the Herts Advertiser‘s music critic, John Manning.
The combined forces rose to the challenge of Rachmaninoff’s choral symphony The Bells and the choral version of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances. The evening opened with a fine performance, under this year’s Festival conductor John Gibbons, of the rarely-heard Shostakovich tone poem October and concluded with a “magnificent’ rendering by choirs and orchestra of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.