Music for the Platinum Jubilee
Readers of my Music Notes will have been prepared for most of our musical plans for the Platinum Jubilee, and I’m pleased to report that all went off smoothly last Sunday. Our music included the Communion Setting in E by Francis Jackson, which tied in nicely with the performance of Jackson’s G major Benedicite in the Jubilee service at St Paul’s, at which the singers included a former Hampstead regular, the bass Martin Oxenham, as well as a former choral scholar of mine at Cambridge, alto Carris Hunt, the Cathedral’s first female lay vicar.
Gordon Jacob’s trumpet fanfare to the National Anthem was played so superbly by the military trumpeters in the service in St Paul’s that I felt moved to play it myself on the organ before the National Anthem at the end of our morning service (hoping I remembered it correctly!).
Attenders at Evensong were surprised to hear Parry’s familiar I was glad, sung at the Queen’s Coronation in 1953, sounding unfamiliar. Parry composed the piece originally for the Coronation of Edward VII in 1902, but felt moved to revise it for the Coronation of George V in 1911. The difference between the two versions is in the music for the Introduction, before the choir enters. Instead of opening with dramatic brass octaves, the original begins in more solemn vein, with echos of Wagnerian harmony. Listeners in 1911 were largely disappointed, preferring their own ‘familiar’ 1902 version…