Coronation Anthem No.1 for chorus & orchestra "Zadok the Priest" (HWV 258). Download free Movie http://www.bestmoviesoftware.com Coronation anthem performed by The King's Consort, Robert King director, from their acclaimed musical reenactment of the Coronation of King George II (1727); from Hungarian Television M2, March 2004. One of the lasts acts of King George I before his death in 1727 was to sign "An Act for the naturalizing of George Frideric Handel and others." Handel's first commission as a naturalized Britsh citizen was to write the music for the coronation later that year. The four anthems Handel composed for the coronation of King George II and Queen Caroline on 11 October 1727 have never lacked popular favour. They were repeatedly performed at concerts and festivals during his life and since, and he incorporated substantial parts of them, with little change except to the words, in several oratorios, notably Esther and Deborah. (Incidentally, two of them were performed at the opening concert of Oxford's Holywell Music Room in 1748). Their success may have contributed to the popular image of Handel as a grandiloquent composer demanding huge forces of voices and instruments - the more the better - the figure stigmatised by Berlioz as a barrel of pork and beer! In fact Handel always matched his music to the occasion and the building for which it was written, and no occasion could be grander than a coronation. His ceremonial style in these anthems differs from his music for theatre in much the same way as the Fireworks Music, designed for performance outdoors, differs from the instrumental concerti. It is wholly extroverted in tone, dealing in masses and broad contrasts rather than delicate colour: he was not going to waste finer points of detail on the reverberant spaces of The Abbey.
