This lovely setting of St Thomas Aquinas’s famous Corpus Christi text will be useful all year round for church choirs which like to perform unaccompanied motets during the administration of Holy Communion.
With its independently moving parts, gentle chromaticism and slow, lilting 5/4 metre, it is a calming evocation of the mystery of the sacrament. In the second verse, the soprano line escapes upwards as if in aspiration for heaven to which the sacrament leads us.
A recording can be heard here in the video below, by the Orlando Singers in Salisbury Cathedral on 24 February 2019, conducted by the composer:
In 2019, the motet was chosen to feature in the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music, being sung at Choral Eucharist in St Giles, Cripplegate, on Sunday 19 May 2019.
Panis Angelicus is published by Chichester Music Press can be ordered from the CMP website.