In the last twenty or so years of the seventeenth century, musicians in London gathered together annually on 22 November to celebrate St Cecilia’s Day in Stationers’ Hall near St Paul’s Cathedral. Here they held a feast and performed musical odes, large scale pieces for instruments, soloists and choir, set to poems in praise of the saint. The foremost composers and poets contributed to the yearly event, notably Henry Purcell and John Dryden. Though the meetings stopped at the turn of the century, the idea of the ode for St Cecilia lived on, and had a stunning renaissance in the 1730s with composers including William Boyce and G.F. Handel. Handel returned to the Cecilian poetry of John Dryden to inspire his music, first setting the latter’s Alexander’s Feast, and subsequently Song for St Cecilia’s Day, 1687, ‘From harmony, from heav’nly harmony’. Boyce worked with two living poets, setting Peter Vidal’s ‘The charms of harmony’ and John Lockwood ‘See fam’d Apollo and the nine’. While Handel’s odes are regularly performed today, Boyce’s have fallen into underserved obscurity. This concert offers an opportunity to hear ‘The charms of harmony’, a work that is a worthy heir to those created for the Cecilian celebrations of the previous century.

2:00pm: Pre-Concert talk given by Dr Bryan White (author of Music for St Cecilia's Day) Addmission free to ticket holders.