Professor Anthony King (1934-2017) was justifiably celebrated as a political scientist, a long-standing member of staff at Essex University and a polling expert on TV at elections. He was also a great music lover and champion of the Suffolk Villages Festival and its musical director Peter Holman. He was chairman of the Festival from 2002 until his death in 2017.

Tony was constantly urging us to explore little-known English music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the Anthony King Memorial Fund is enabling us to do this with increased boldness. We have done concert performances of Thomas Arne’s Alfred (2017 Festival) and John Eccles’s opera Semele (May 2018), and at the 2019 Festival, Solomon by William Boyce and The Song of Moses and other work by Thomas Linley Jr. 

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