CE St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral, Edinburgh 13th August 2014

[Vox Humana]

Slating Precentores (DM) is one thing, but you can't get away with 'having a go at' the Rose Responses; they've never "grated" in their increasingly long life. But perhaps you feel the repertoire of the service demanded some overblown P&R, like the Howells ones. (Rose, Radcliffe & Leighton remain at the forefront of 20th C settings IMHO)
PS I'm only really here to add to the plaudits of an excellent Evensong!

I wasn't having a go at the (very fine) Rose responses; I was having a go at the programming. :) I do not know of any Victorian or later responses that would have fitted with that programme (are there actually any Victorian settings worth airing?) Personally I would have used one of the Tudor sets. I agree about the Leighton responses. I have never quite clicked with the Radcliffe, but that's most likely because I don't know them very well.

[terratogen]

Finally had the chance to listen to this service and came away grateful for and impressed by this late-summer Evensong.

I don't know, had I been listening 'blind,' that I would have recognised St Mary's choir as itself; perhaps it's a function more of the repertoire than of anything else, but the choir strike me as sounding rather profoundly different over the radio than they do on their recent records— the former perhaps a bit warmer and more mellow, the latter more piercing, with an edge of the spine-tingling. I've enjoyed both immensely and found this particular service beautifully and powerfully delivered, both where the music was my cup of tea and where it wasn't.

Perhaps this is morbid, but I always look forward to hearing, where I can find it, the verses of the sixty-ninth psalm in which the psalmist (and the chant with him) lurches suddenly from recounting his torment to wishing that his tormenters be mercilessly 'wiped out of the book of the living'— verses that St Mary's skipped over in this broadcast. Is it common to omit the grislier verses of certain psalms? I'm thinking, too, of verses like 'Blessed shall he be taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones,' which may be bleaker still and which we missed entirely from St Davids due the the festival occasion of its most recent broadcast.

[Vox Humana]

Is it common to omit the grislier verses of certain psalms? I'm thinking, too, of verses like 'Blessed shall he be taketh thy children and throweth them against the stones,' which may be bleaker still and which we missed entirely from St Davids due the the festival occasion of its most recent broadcast.

It is now quite usual, I think. The Prayer Book as Proposed in 1928 recommended excising certain verses in the psalms that were felt to reflect unchristian sentiments. These included the whole of psalm 58. Although the 1928 prayer book did not gain legal approval, The Oxford Psalter (c.1930?) showed these recommendations by bracketing the relevant verses. I would have thought that all, or almost all, cathedrals observe these omissions.

[Miles Coverdale]

The Prayer Book as Proposed in 1928 recommended excising certain verses in the psalms that were felt to reflect unchristian sentiments.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the psalms are not Christian texts.

[Vox Humana]

True, but they have been appropriated by Christians and are used in Christian services to illuminate Christian tenets - and the same could be said for the rest of the Old Testament. The Anglican Church at least has always adopted a pick-and-mix approach to the bible to justify whatever vision of eternal truth is currently in fashion.

[vinteuil]

... if memory serves, the name of the heresy which, among other things, wished to exclude Old Testament texts from the Christian canon is Marcionism .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism

.