A Coronation Celebration

Leominster Choral Society

‘Zadok the priest’: Handel’s anthem, so evocative of the splendour and solemnity in Westminster Abbey at a coronation, is the opening item in Leominster Choral Society’s summer concert this year, ‘A Coronation Celebration’.

The programme features all four of the Coronation Anthems Handel wrote for the coronation of George II in 1727; it continues with Mozart’s Coronation Mass and two of his exquisitely beautiful short pieces, ‘Laudate Dominum’ and ‘Ave Verum Corpus’.

‘I was Glad’ completes the programme – though not the famous setting by Hubert Parry, splendid though that is. In this concert the audience will have an opportunity to hear the less well-known, but richly inventive, joyful baroque version by Henry Purcell (used at the coronation of James II in 1685).

The organist will be Hilary Norris and the soloists Katie Trethewey, soprano, Olivia Moore, contralto, Jonathan Bungard, tenor, and Jonathan Brown, bass; the concert will be conducted by the choir’s Musical Director, James Atherton – formerly a tenor lay clerk at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.