It was the custom of bygone days for sovereigns to require and for subjects to express respect and devotion in terms of unmeasured hyperbole; such conventional homage added little lustre to the monarch for whose honour it was designed; the current coin of compliment rang hollow. Your Majesty has taught your subjects to value sincerity above praise, and genuine affections above indiscriminate adulation; the auspicious year in which your Majesty attains in health and vigour a patriarchal age, gives your Majesty’s servants a natural opportunity for expressing the devotion to your Throne and Person which lies at the heart of all your subjects.

In these works the spirit of part-song was now predominant, but it did not prevent some of the thirteen composers from deferring to the madrigal style. Stainer’s setting of his son’s poem Flora’s Queen is a thoroughly entertaining essay in Renaissance modal harmony and imitation, Handelian grandeur (replete with quasi cantus firmus acclamations of ‘Long live Victoria!’) and a coda ‘poached’, as Stainer wryly admitted, from Gibbons.

from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2016