Hymn singing is a wonderful way for people of all backgrounds, regardless of faith, regardless of any particular musical ability, to join together in worship and in song. It’s very often the text, rather than the tune to which it is set that has ensured a hymn’s lasting popularity. Indeed some of these texts, though […]

Imposing recordings of the ‘Coronation Mass’ and the ‘Vespers’ (which includes the famous ‘Laudate dominum’) plus Erna Spoorenberg, radiant in the ‘Exsultate, jubilate’.

A beautiful collection of Purcell favourites, both from recent times with artists of the calibre of Emma Kirkby and Christopher Hogwood, to such Purcell champions of the mid-20th century as Benjamin Britten, whose rousing arrangement and performance of the ‘Chaconne in G minor’ is here included.

The potential of music as a means of adding dignity and grandeur to state occasions has surely been lost on a few rulers in history. Portraits of antique kings and queens are more often admired (or the reverse) for their artistic qualities, as opposed to the enhancement in the status of their subjects they were […]

Purcell wrote so much in so many different spheres of musical activity that it is easy to forget that one of his main tasks was to be a royal composer, to provide music for the occasions of State in Westminster Abbey, just as the Gabrielis had done for the Doge at St Mark’s or Lully […]

More than 250 years of music celebrating the reign of the great British monarchs CD 1 – HANDEL: Coronation Anthems Handel’s four uplifting Coronation Anthems, including the epic Zadok the Priest with the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, and his beautiful Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne, with its celestial invocation for trumpet and counter-tenor, ‘Eternal […]