Three Odes with Orchestra

Complementary to William Croft’s music for Anglican worship collected in MB91, the contents of its successor volume MB108 offer further evidence to confirm his status as a leading figure in English music between the death of Henry Purcell and the arrival of Handel in London. With Noise of Cannon and Laurus cruentas display his command of the high baroque Italian style and of the patterns of the Restoration court and Cecilian odes. In its scale and structural complexity, the former is among the composer’s most ambitious concerted works. Written to celebrate the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, and first performed in Oxford that year on the occasion of Croft’s receiving a doctorate in music, the two scores contain some of his most technically accomplished and expressive music, transcending the occasional nature of their texts. Both are here published for the first time in a modern edition. The third Croft ode, The Heavenly Warlike Goddess Now Disarmed, survives in a single manuscript source. A shorter and probably earlier piece, of obscure provenance though perhaps associated with St Cecilia’s Day, it sheds valuable light on the composer’s later development.