This new recording from Westminster presents a delightful and unusual selection of music for Christmas from the Abbey Choir. It encompasses all the diverse themes of Christmas which have inspired composers across the ages: light shining in darkness; the tenderness of mother and child; the fulfilment of promise; and the warm merriment of corporate celebration.

An excellent selection of contemporary carols features the composers Jonathan Dove and Bob Chilcott among others. The richness of twentieth-century church music is illustrated in works by Poulenc, Walton, Mathias and Leighton, and by the heartbreakingly lovely piece The little road to Bethlehem by Michael Head. Skilful arrangements of the traditional carols Silent night, In dulci jubilo and I saw three ships, complete this attractive seasonal release.

The idiosyncratic spelling of the album title—'caroll', not 'carol'—is deliberate, taken from the 17th-century poem by Robert Herrick as set by Kenneth Leighton in 1953 (to give it in its full splendour, Herrick's title is 'A Christmas Caroll, sung to the King in the Presence at White-Hall').

It would have been all too easy for the Choir of Westminster Abbey to release yet another compilation of well-known favourites, but the carol collection recorded here is rather more varied. It's certainly too good to limit it to Christmas! Not that there's any lack of seasonal fare. There are contemporary carols celebrating mother and child (by Sir John Rutter), the shepherds (by Bob Chilcott), and the arrival of the wise men (by Jonathan Dove); traditional arrangements of familiar carols such as 'In dulci jubilo' and 'Silent night'; and works by Leighton, Walton and Mathias which illustrate the richness of 20th-century church music. But the highlight (if there has to be just one) must be Poulenc's 'Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël': four piercingly beautiful, bittersweet miniatures utterly characteristic of this composer.

The image of the Abbey's west towers, which graces the album cover, is taken from a 19th-century engraving. A familiar London landmark, the towers were the last part of the Abbey to be completed in 1745, although there has been a 'west minster' church (to distinguish it from St Paul's, the 'east minster', in what is now the City of London) on the site for the best part of 1000 years, where Christian worship has been practised. Music has been—and continues to be—an inseparable part of that worship, central to which has always been the Abbey Choir, which participates not only in the daily services at the Abbey and in the festivals marking the passing of the liturgical year, but also in the royal, state and national occasions which attract worldwide attention.