CD Review
Traditional and contemporary carols: On Christmas Night: Carols from St Giles' Cathedral
- Composer
- Traditional and contemporary carols
- Artist
- Choir of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh
- Label
- Acclaim Productions
- Catalogue
- AGD002
On Christmas Night is the Choir of St Giles’ Cathedral’s Christmas companion to their wider choral anthology O Clap Your Hands: A Century of Inspiration, released under the same small AGD catalogue series (AGD001 and AGD002) and sold and promoted together, the two discs were even cited side by side by outside retailers as a natural pair for anyone wanting both the choir’s core repertoire and its Christmas programme in one purchase.
Where the companion disc ranges across a century of English and Scottish cathedral music from Bairstow through to living Scottish composers Sally Beamish and Cecilia McDowall, On Christmas Night narrows that same choir’s focus to the specifically seasonal repertoire, the traditional and contemporary carols that make up a cathedral choir’s Christmas season, sung by the same forces documenting their own tradition on record.
About St Giles’ Cathedral and its choir
St Giles’ Cathedral sits at the heart of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile as the High Kirk of the Church of Scotland, and has maintained a serious choral and organ tradition alongside its role as one of the city’s most prominent working churches. For a specialist classical shop like mmmusic, reviewing both of the cathedral choir’s own recordings made straightforward sense, they documented, on disc, a choral tradition based a short walk from the shop’s own counter on Grindlay Street.
A note on this page
No original mmmusic review text for this page survived in any archive we could recover; its subject and catalogue number (AGD 002) are independently confirmed by a UK church-music resource site, Resourcing Mission, which lists this mmmusic page as its UK sales reference for the recording alongside its companion disc, O Clap Your Hands, and by the release’s own listing, which confirms Michael Harris and Peter Backhouse as the same director and organist on both discs.
Questions about this recording
Is this connected to the choir's other recording, O Clap Your Hands?
Yes, the two were released as a companion pair under the same AGD catalogue prefix (AGD001 and AGD002) by the Choir of St Giles' Cathedral, and were sold and reviewed together.
Who directs the choir on this recording?
Michael Harris directs, with Peter Backhouse on organ, the same pairing as the companion disc, confirmed on the album's own sleeve.
Where does the choir perform?
At St Giles' Cathedral on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, the High Kirk of the Church of Scotland.
Is this recording still available to buy?
It's sold directly through St Giles' Cathedral's own shop. We don't run an in-house shop ourselves, so we link out to Amazon and Discogs below as a starting point, though the cathedral itself is the most reliable source.
