A Coronation Celebration

June 2nd 2018 will be the 65th anniversary of the coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, an occasion marked by some stirring music. But June 2nd is also Elgar’s birthday, while 2018 has also seen the centenary of the death of Sir Hubert Parry.

On this date, Leominster Choral Society will celebrate these anniversaries at a concert in the Priory with music linked to the events, by English composers.

 Zadok the Priest is particularly notable: first sung in Handel’s setting at the coronation of King George II in 1727, it has been sung at every British coronation since. (And the words were sung for centuries before that, at every British, and before that English, coronation right back to that of King Edgar in 973AD.)

Handel – an English composer?  Yes indeed! He was born in Germany, but after living in London for many years became a naturalised Englishman in the same year that his setting of Zadok was first sung at a coronation.

Parry’s quintessentially English music to be sung by the choral society will include I was Glad and Blest Pair of Sirens, while the audience will be invited to join in singing his Jerusalem – first sung by massed women at the Royal Albert Hall at a suffrage rally in 1918 and still sung at many Women’s Institute gatherings. Audience participation will also be invited for Vaughan Williams’s setting of The Old Hundredth, which will be followed by a performance by well-known organist Hilary Norris of Parry’s Chorale Fantasia on The Old Hundredth and Elgar’s Imperial March.

Other programme items will include Charles Villiers Stanford’s How beauteous are their feet (also sung at the 1953 Coronation) and Elgar’s Te Deum and Benedictus, which were written for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1897.

Tickets may be obtained from Fletchers Newsagents in Broad Street, Leominster, and the Leominster Tourist Information Centre in Corn Square, or online.

Event date: 
Saturday, 2 June 2018 - 7:00pm to 9:45pm
Ticket Prices: 
Tickets in advance £10; on the door £12; accompanied under-16s free
Location: 
Leominster Priory
Church Street
HR6 8NH Leominster
United Kingdom