With composers such as William Byrd, Orlando Gibbons and Thomas Tomkins at the height of their powers, the reign of James I was a golden age for English music.

This programme is a musical tour of Britain, starting at the court of Whitehall with some of the sublime anthems written for the Chapel Royal, including Gibbons’s ‘This is the record of John’ and Tomkins’s ‘When David heard that Absalom was slain’, written on the death of Prince Henry in 1613. Travelling through the crowded and noisy streets of London, where we hear extraordinary elaborations of street cries by Richard Dering and Thomas Ravenscroft, we visit Norfolk (Byrd’s elegy for a pet dog at Appleton House), Scotland (an anthem for James’s visit to Holyrood in 1617) and the West Country (Ravenscroft’s vivid description of a rustic wedding).

A high point of the tour is Dering’s Country Cries, an evocation of rustic life that includes farmyard animals, a swarm of bees and a whistling carter.