Reviewed by Steven Whitehead

A pleasant surprise. Your reviewer would not have placed Blackburn Cathedral high on his scale of musical cathedrals but he would have been wrong. Here we have not one but three choirs, the full Cathedral Choir, Blackburn Cathedral Girls’ Choir, and the Renaissance Singers Of Blackburn Cathedral and all sound splendid. They are directed by Richard Tanner with Greg Morris playing the organ. The next surprise was the content. The subtitle is ‘Settings Of The Magnificat And Nunc Dimittis’ and we get eight of each by eight composers. I expected a useful liturgical reference resource and, indeed, it is that but this underestimates the talents of the composers. If, like me, you think that one “Magnificat” is much the same as any other, think again. There are some good examples here, including Blackburn's own Henry Smart, John Tavener’s Byzantine reading of the Magnificat and concluding with Herbert Howells.

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