A Venetian Coronation 1565
Gabrieli, Paul McCreesh
Temple Church, 19 May 2026

photo: Frances Marshall, from 2022 St John’s, Smith Square rehearsals

Under the auspices of Temple Music, Paul McCreesh’s Gabrieli (formally Gabrieli Consort) brought their large-scale liturgical reconstruction of the 1595 Coronation Mass for the Venetian Doge Marino Grimani. This was first performed in St John’s, Smith Square, in 1990 and has since been recorded twice and performed numerous times around the world, most recently in London in 2022 in a return to St John’s, Smith Square. I have heard this on several occasions, including the 2022 performance and during the reopening of Christ Church Spitalfields in 2005. The big advantage of those performances was the layout of the churches, both having galleries running the full length of the church, allowing the multidimensional aspects of the event to be portrayed in a manner that could be considered close to the original performance. That was in St Mark’s, Venice, the Doge’s private chapel as well as the state church of Venice. The music for such ceremonial events would have been focused on the central seats for the Doge and his entourage rather than the wider audience spaced around the rest of the church. Organs, instruments and singers were positioned on galleries on either side of the Doge’s central space.

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