Arise, Shine

McDowall: Adoro te devote; Allegri: Miserere mei, Deus; Borel Regina Caeli; Maryam Giraud: Rain; Duruflé: Ubi caritas, Op. 10 No. 1; Gruber: Silent Night; Lucy Walker: The Lord's Prayer; A Hymn for St Cecilia; O sacrum convivium; Messiaen: O sacrum convivium; Gjeilo: Ubi caritas; Maggie Kaposamweo: Abide with Me; Anna Lapwood: Arise Shine; An Irish Blessing; Arlen: Over the Rainbow.

The Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge
Anna Lapwood
Molly Hord (organ); Sophia Membery (organ); Sophia Membery (harp)
Sony19802963032

After nine years at the helm of the Chapel Choir of Pembroke College, Cambridge, Anna Lapwood has produced in Arise, Shine an album that is at once a valediction and a celebration — meticulous in conception, deeply personal in spirit, and glowing with the kind of affectionate musicianship that only comes when a director and choir have truly grown together. The programme is characteristically thoughtful in its architecture, pairing contrasting settings of the same sacred texts: Duruflé's luminous Ubi Caritas alongside Ola Gjeilo's haunting version and Messiaen's O Sacrum Convivium mirrored by a setting from Lucy Walker – a former alto who knows this choir's particular timbre from the inside. The juxtapositions illuminate both composers, and Lapwood handles these pairings with real intelligence, never forcing comparisons but allowing them to resonate naturally. Walker's Lord's Prayer is one of the best settings of the prayer I have heard in a long time.

The balance and vocal tone throughout are exemplary, the diction clean without ever feeling clinical. The title track and Lapwood's own An Irish Blessing—both written in response to particular people and moments during her Pembroke years—carry an obvious warmth between the composer, conductor, and singers, with the choir responding to the subtlest dynamic shading with an ease born of long familiarity. Allegri's Miserere receives a performance of genuine beauty.

There is considerable human interest in the album's peripheries. A piece by Maryam Giraud, who entered the Girls' Choir that Lapwood founded in 2018 and is now an undergraduate at the college, sets a text by her fellow alto Cassidy McKinlay; and the commission for Abide With Me by the young Zambian composer Maggie Kaposamweo helped fund her studies at the University of Lusaka. These are not incidental details — they speak to what Lapwood has been quietly doing at Pembroke all along.

And then there is the closing track: Harold Arlen's Somewhere Over the Rainbow. It might seem an unlikely place to end a choral album rooted in the sacred repertoire, but here it makes complete sense. Lapwood is not reaching for novelty; she is reaching for something true — the idea that beauty and magic exist, if only we can find our way to them. In that spirit, it is the most honest ending the album could have had.

Gloriously done.