The phrase in the title used sometimes to be replaced by other words in performances of O Lord look down from heaven by Battishill, but not when I heard Merton College choir sing it at evensong in Bath Abbey earlier this month (nor in a recent evensong broadcast). It was, however, omitted from the text printed in the service sheet.
Merton joined forces with the girls and men of Bath Abbey choir for this service. There were some 60 singers in the combined group, which suited Battishill’s and Stanford in B flat rather more than Tomkins respones and Tallis. The sound was certainly powerful! There was a good-sized congregation and my only quibble was that we didn’t get a hymn to sing, unlike the weekday evensong which inaugurated the Abbey’s Chamber Choir last autumn.
Merton does something unique, I think, in Oxbridge and offers entrance choral scholarships to students at other Colleges. (I suspect Cambridge, with its competitive choral rivalry between Colleges, would not tolerate this.) So the choir, which admittedly always did have a significant proportion of non-Mertonians, is increasingly a University choir which happens to be based at Merton.