Music for State Occasions: Locke, Blow, Purcell, Croft, Boyce and Handel

We celebrate our founder Peter Holman’s 80th birthday with a programme of ceremonial music from the seventeenth and eighteenth century English court. Seventeenth-century state occasions are represented by Matthew Locke’s great polychoral anthem ‘Be thou exalted, Lord’, written in 1666 to celebrate a victory over the Dutch, and the two matching anthems written for James II’s coronation in 1685, John Blow’s ‘God spake sometime in visions’ and Henry Purcell’s ‘My heart is inditing’. Eighteenth-century coronations are represented by Handel’s ‘Zadok the priest’ and ‘My heart is inditing’ (George II, 1727) and anthems by William Boyce (George III, 1761). By contrast, we include William Croft’s moving Burial Service, used at every state funeral since the early eighteenth century.