COMPOSERS: Handel/Blow
LABELS: Decca
WORKS: Coronation Anthems; Anthems
PERFORMER: Choir of King’s College, Cambridge/ECO/Academy of St Martin in the Fields/David Willcocks
CATALOGUE NO: 436 256-2 ADD
There is an apt grandeur and weightiness to David Willcocks’s accounts of Handel’s great Coronation Anthems: Zadok the Priest has been performed at every coronation since George II’sin 1727, and here we get some sense of the continuity of the English choral tradition. The Blow anthems (here featuring a young Philip Langridge) show what Handel already had to build on; especially memorable is the spacious O Sing unto the Lord.
William Humphrey-Jones