CD Review
Bairstow, Jackson, Leighton, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and others: O Clap Your Hands: A Century of Inspiration
- Composer
- Bairstow, Jackson, Leighton, Stanford, Vaughan Williams and others
- Artist
- Choir and Organ of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh / Michael Harris; Peter Backhouse, organ
- Label
- Aegidius / Acclaim Productions
- Catalogue
- AGD 001
O Clap Your Hands: A Century of Inspiration gathers a hundred years of British choral music, 1914 to 2014, as sung by the Choir of St Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh, directed by Michael Harris, with Peter Backhouse at the organ. The programme includes works by Edward Bairstow, one of the defining figures of English cathedral music in the early 20th century and organist of York Minster for three decades; Francis Jackson, Bairstow’s own pupil and eventual successor at York; Kenneth Leighton, one of the major 20th-century composers for choir and organ with strong Anglo-Scottish credentials of his own; and two towering earlier figures in Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose own choral writing sits at the root of much of what the rest of the programme responds to.
As the home church of the Church of Scotland’s High Kirk on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, St Giles’ Cathedral has long maintained a choral and organ tradition of real substance, and this recording, made under Michael Harris’s direction, documents that tradition across a genuinely wide historical span, tracing a single British choral lineage from its Edwardian-era roots through to the mid-to-late 20th century.
About the choir
The Choir of St Giles’ Cathedral sings the daily and Sunday liturgy at one of Edinburgh’s most prominent churches, a role that has historically supported a serious, sustained choral and organ tradition comparable to the cathedral choirs of the Anglican tradition just across the border, even though St Giles’ itself sits within the different institutional structure of the Church of Scotland. Recordings like this one function as much as a document of that specific choir’s sound and repertoire choices at a given time as a standalone album for the general listener.
A note on this page
No original mmmusic review text for this page survived in any archive we could recover; its subject is 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 Christmas disc. Rather than guess at what was originally written, the text above has been written fresh from verified facts about the recording and its performers, including the cover’s own listed repertoire, which corrected an earlier draft of this page.
Questions about this recording
Where was this recorded?
By the Choir and Organ of St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh, the same cathedral whose choir made this and its companion Christmas disc, both reviewed by mmmusic, its own city's specialist classical shop.
What time span does the repertoire cover?
A century, 1914 to 2014, including works by Edward Bairstow, Francis Jackson, Kenneth Leighton, Charles Villiers Stanford and Ralph Vaughan Williams, among others, running from the high Anglican-cathedral tradition through to more recent British choral writing.
What does the album's title reference?
"O Clap Your Hands" is a well-known text (from Psalm 47) that's been set by numerous British composers for choir and organ, a fitting anchor title for a programme surveying a century of exactly that tradition.
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.
