What are some of your favourite Christian/Gospel songs?

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Here is the air If God be for us, from Händel’s oratorio Messiah. The text, taken from Romans 8:31, 33 & 34, appears below. The singer is Emma Kirkby, with the Academy of Ancient Music led by Christopher Hogwood. This extract is taken from a complete performance of the oratorio that was filmed in Westminster Abbey in 1982.

If God be for us, who can be against us?
Who shall lay anything to the charge of
God’s elect?
It is God that justifieth.
Who is he that condemneth?
It is Christ that died, yea rather,
That is risen again,
Who is at the right hand of God
Who makes intercession for us.

 
Here is the joyful Latin motet, Exsultate, jubilate, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Written in the 1770s for a castrato singer, it is usually sung by women nowadays, though some countertenors possessing a good high register have attempted it. Here, it is performed by the brilliant (and beautiful!) Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli, accompanied by the Vienna Philharmonic led by Riccardo Muti. This extract is taken from a concert filmed in 2006, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth.

 
If it’s not in a hymnal, I can’t imagine I’d care for it. I have an aversion to anything that wouldn’t be used liturgically.
 
Here is the chorus Stimmt an die Saiten(Awake the lyre), from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation. Late in life, inspired by the example of Händel’s oratorios, Haydn composed this work to texts from Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as the Bible. The freshness and vitality of Haydn’s writing banish any thought of ponderous ‘sermonising’, and open the heart of the listener to new gratitude for the gift of existence. The late, great Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon tells the story of working in a record store in Manhattan just after the war, and playing one of the early recordings of The Creation on a sidewalk phonograph in order to attract customers. According to Landon, a crowd instantly formed round the record player, and afforded him the vision of grown men, blue collar types who had likely never heard a note of classical music in their lives, weeping uncontrollably at the glorious sounds that were ravishing their ears. If the celestial choirs sing music that is anything like this, it will be all we could wish for, and more than we deserve. An English translation of the text appears below. The Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists are led by Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Awake the harp, the lyre awake,
And let thy joyful song resound.
Rejoice in the Lord, the mighty God,
For He both heaven and earth
Hath cloth’d in stately dress.

 
Another air from Händel’s Messiah.

How beautiful are the feet of them
That preach the gospel of peace
And bring glad tidings of good things.
 
Here is a setting of the thirty-eighth psalm, by the sixteenth-century English Catholic composer John Dowland.

 
“Hail Holy Queen” by The Thirsting
“Seven Joys of Mary” by Great Big Sea
“No one like you” by Barlow Girl
 
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Here is the opening aria from cantata 170 by Bach. I consider this to be the finest cantata ever penned by Bach, and the more renditions of it hear, the more my love for it grows. The entire movement is sublime, but the rising instrumental passage beginning at 5:45 is particularly affecting, and never fails to move me profoundly. A translation of the text appears below. The singer is Damien Guillon, accompanied by The Heavenly Banquet.

Cheering repose, beloved joy of the soul,
Thou canst not be found in the sins of Hell,
But rather in Heaven’s harmony.
Thou alone strengthen’st the frail breast.
So virtue’s pure gifts
Shall dwell in my heart.

 
Here is Rejoice my countrymen, from the oratorio Belshazzar by Händel. The boy Daniel cheers his fellow captive Israelites by repeating the age-old prophecy of their liberation at the hands of Cyrus, the Persian ruler. Paul Esswood is Daniel, with the Concentus Musicus of Vienna led by Nikolaus Harnoncourt.

 
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