Ely Cathedral rises out of the flatlands of East Anglia like a glorious surprise. Its towers and parapets dwarf the surrounding buildings and landscape. As the Cathedral’s website explains the mindset of its intellectual authors, ‘The Benedictine monks only concern was to glorify God, and nothing less than a building on a majestic scale would do.’
God, it is reported elsewhere, is capable of being glorified by many means. Having visited the cathedral on numerous occasions, I have no doubt that its Benedictines hit on one of them.
Beautiful music is made in these remarkable environs. Some of it reaches all the way back to the biblical psalms and their Medieval and Renaissance musical settings. Here the choristers of the Ely School sing sixteen of them in the halting, regular way of the English Choral Tradition.
The album provides a taste of something good, something old. Something quite Old School, capable and worthy of slowing down New Souls, if only for a splendid seventy-four minutes and nineteen seconds.
Canter Bridge 
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