‘It’s the first great example of British exceptionalism, and you know where that’s got us,” Paul McCreesh remarked, addressing the audience ahead of his performance of King Arthur with his Gabrieli Consort and Players. Premiered in 1691, three years after the so-called glorious revolution established constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy in this country, Purcell’s opera aimed to bolster the Stuart dynasty by celebrating a new arcadian Britain, rising “in triumph o’er the main”. Hearing it in our politically uncertain times is inevitably fraught with irony, and when we reached the Act V drinking song, with its refrain “hoigh for the honour of Old England,” EU flags were unfurled from music stands and waved by singers and players as the audience roared its approval.

The Gabrieli Consort have been performing the work for 25 years, though on this occasion they returned to it in a critical edition prepared by Christopher Suckling and McCreesh himself, which aims to reproduce the spare yet sensual sound-world heard by its first audiences. Continuo is banished from choruses and dances. A baroque trumpet peals out in moments of glory, and a solo lute accompanies How Blest Are Shepherds, where we might expect a quota of strings.

Above all, though, this was an evening of joyous, wonderfully elegant music-making. Nine singers shared the songs and choruses between them, a flawless ensemble of equals, though Anna Dennis and Mhairi Lawson stood out as a seductive pair of sirens, and Dennis’s Fairest Isle was particularly ravishing. The playing, meanwhile, had everything one could wish for in its deftness, grace and lightness of touch.