The concert celebrates the extraordinary find of the HMS Gloucester in Norfolk, a famous warship that sank near Great Yarmouth in 1682, creating political ripples that shaped the nation we live in today.

This very exiting baroque programme is designed as a musical companion to The Last Voyage of the Gloucester: Norfolk’s Royal Shipwreck, the major exhibition at the Norwich Castle Museum, which will be closed one week after the  concert.

The programme was created with the help of the exhibition’s curators, Prof. Claire Jowitt and Dr. Benjamin Redding of the UEA.

James Stuart, Duke of York and Albany survived the ship’s sinking – to become King James II and VII in 1685. It was an important ‘almost’ moment in British political history: a royal shipwreck causing the very near-death of the Catholic heir to the Protestant throne at a time of great political and religious tension.

The programme will have two parts: an exquisite selection of consort music that would have been played aboard the Gloucester and similar ships in the 17th century (Purcell, Locke, Lawes), and a suite from Matthew Locke’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s Tempest.