Sacred choral music by Sarah MacDonald

Sing, my soul, his wondrous love; Evening Service in A flat; The manger is empty – A Sequence for Christmas; Arise, shine; Love has come; Crux fidelis; O sacrum convivium; Quid retribuam Domino; Salut, ô Reine; Sub tuum praesidium; Take delight in the Lord; The midst of thy temple; For they shall be comforted; Selwyn College Grace

The Chapel Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge
Adam Field organ
conducted by Sarah MacDonald

Regent Records REGCD588
https://www.regent-records.co.uk/

Sarah MacDonald has a rare gift: a genuine melodic instinct, an intimate understanding of the voices she writes for, and an ear for accompaniments that support rather than smother. This lovely new disc of her choral music makes the case emphatically and does so with real style.

MacDonald is, by any measure, one of the more significant figures in contemporary Anglican church music – a tireless champion of young singers and organists and one of the foremost advocates for new sacred choral repertoire by living female composers. She has been Director of Music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, since 1999, the first woman to hold such a post in an Oxbridge chapel, and was appointed University Organist at Cambridge in 2023 – again, a first for a woman in a role dating back to 1670. Canadian by birth, she arrived in the UK in 1992 as organ scholar of Robinson College, having trained at the Glenn Gould School in Toronto under Leon Fleisher, Marek Jablonski and John Tuttle.

All of which is background; what matters here is the music, and it is a delight. Her own chapel choir of Selwyn College sings with a polish that belies the demands of undergraduate life, recorded in the radiant, spacious acoustic of Ely Cathedral, where MacDonald is also the director of the girl choristers. The ensemble's diction, intonation, and balance are all delectably precise, and the phrasing, dynamic shading, and rhythmic vitality throughout the performance are genuinely impressive.

The programme itself is generous and cannily varied: a setting of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, a carol sequence, a Missa Brevis, and a clutch of anthems and motets for various points in the church year. McDonald's harmonic language is consistently delicious—nowhere more so than in Arise, Shine, where her compositional instincts and her evident love of the text she is setting fuse completely. The Missa Brevis is a particular highlight, its Gloria brimming with energy, while organist Adam Field is the ideal collaborator throughout: exciting when the music demands it but never once intrusive and deploying the reeds of the Ely organ with a subtlety in the evening service that is all the more effective for its restraint.

It would be easy for a single-composer disc to feel monochrome, but the sheer diversity of this curated programme — a cappella writing set against organ-accompanied grandeur and intimate motets against festive energy — keeps the ear consistently engaged. The result is a disc that not only showcases a genuinely important composer but also does so with real warmth and imagination.