BBC Review 1bj6o
As an exercise in musical imagination this is a fascinating and hugely entertaining one.
Paul Cutts 2002
The growth of historically informed performance has led to some marvellous musical-archaeological explorations. Purcell scholar Robert King and his eponymous groups here offer - in a two-CD set - a 'reconstruction' of the coronation of King George II in October 1727.
Anyone buying this recording expecting a precise reflection of an historic day will be disappointed. By all contemporary s, the coronation of King George II and his Queen was a right royal mess of musical confusion with the wrong anthems being performed in the wrong places and sometimes not at all. But as an exercise in musical imagination Robert King's latest project is a fascinating and hugely entertaining one.
With no indisputable record of where each piece was performed in the Westminster Abbey service, King has applied his scholastic brain to a full-scale enactment of the ceremony - complete with pealing bells and musicians processing through the recording space (St Jude-on-the-Hill in London's Hampstead Garden Suburb). It makes for evocative listening, although there's a certain self-conscious edge to some aspects of the recording (not least, the underpowered shouts of 'Vivat') that doesn't always sit comfortably with the sheer musical quality of it.
What quality, though! Despite the 'historically uninformed' use of female voices, King's forces are in fine fettle in music of peerless pomp and circumstance. From William Child's aristocratic anthem O Lord, grant the King a long life to the mighty Te Deum of Orlando Gibbons, these two discs encom some of the greatest music written by British composers in any age.
But the crowning glory (to coin a coronation phrase) is the music of George Frideric Handel. At the peak of his powers, Handel was commissioned to write no fewer than four new anthems for the service. Among them was Zadok the Priest, a work of such unsured genius that it has been performed at every British coronation since (a unique achievement).
King opts for slower tempos than expected, illuminating every stately arpeggio in the opening instrumental prelude until the explosive entry of the voices. As he comments in his informative accompanying notes, it 'must have raised the hairs on every neck in the Abbey'. Perhaps the pace is a little too stately - there's the slightest lack of volcanic drama in King's reading that leaves one feeling slightly cheated at its conclusion. In of beauty of tone and musical intelligence, however, the renditions are as polished as one would expect. And in the lovely anthem My heart is inditing, written specifically for the simultaneous coronation of Queen Caroline, the Choir of the King's Consort are at their sensitive best.
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