Three fantastic albums celebrating the finest of British music. CD1 Rule Britannia! Stirring Songs & Patriotic MusicMusic chosen for its thrill factor: from trumpets and drums to soaring choral voices, this programme has a "Last Night of the Proms" feel. It features the great and the good of English music of the past including Handel, Holst, Elgar and Walton. We unfurl a splendid tapestry of British music that will reveal our innate pride and patriotism. It spans the centuries from the Restoration to our second Elizabethan age and features music, which is dear to the hearts of everyone who inhabits "this sceptr"d isle". We celebrate our heritage and heroism through the imagination of composers to whom this country meant a great deal - music, which carries an echo of history, and with which Britons celebrate their great national occasions, both solemn and joyful. CD2 Changing the Guard - great military band music "They"re changing the guard at Buckingham Palace..." and this is what they might play: a superb mix of marching tunes and popular songs, played here by a mighty tour de force of virtuoso bandsmen chosen from amongst the best bands from Her Majesty"s Armed Forces. CD3 Trafalgar - A celebration of Horatio, Lord Nelson This album is full of the sea: each piece of music has been specially selected because of its ability to evoke the waves or the heroism of the sailors who ply its briny deeps. There"s evocation, too, of the great British hero, Horatio Lord Nelson, through sea songs and through the mood of many of the pieces. The music is British, and includes some of this island nation"s finest composers, from the eighteenth century William Boyce, Master of the Kinge"s Musicke, to the technically brilliant Ralph Vaughan Williams, who died less than fifty years ago. Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel, and his fine understanding of the orchestra can be heard in every work on this album. William Walton also had a fine grasp of orchestral colour, and like so many British composers, including his contemporaries Eric Coates and Charles Williams, he could express a mood very quickly and easily in his music.And, of course, no album of this type would be complete without some music from George Frideric Handel, an honorary Englishman, who made London his home in the early eighteenth century, and whose musical influence lingered on in Britain and the minds of its composers for nearly two hundred years. The Rev JB Dykes was one of our greatest hymn writers, and a highly influential figure in the Church of England in the nineteenth century. Many of his works, including the Seamen"s Hymn, "Eternal Father, strong to save" appeared in "Hymns Ancient and Modern", which was first published in 1861.