Robert King and the King's Consort have been crowning George II across Europe for much of this golden jubilee year. They brought their faithful reconstruction of the events in Westminster Abbey on October 11 1727 to the Royal Albert Hall on Tuesday. Every morsel of the service was included - the anthems, hymns, processionals, fanfares, drum rolls and celebratory pealing bells, together with the spoken invocations and the sung and sometimes shouted responses of the congregation.

In essence, the structure of the coronation service has not changed for the best part of a millennium, though the musical component has increased in importance through the centuries, with works specially commissioned from leading composers of the day. But what set George II's enthronement apart from earlier events was the involvement of Handel, who composed the processional that opened the ceremony, and four new coronation anthems for the occasion, including Zadok the Priest, which has been a constant in the services ever since. Those imposing pieces provided the pillars around which King's re-creation was built, but there were also backward glances to the leading English composers of the previous centuries: Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis, John Blow and Henry Purcell.

A coronation was a piece of ritual theatre as much as a musical event, and the Albert Hall certainly allows for the processions and the spatial effects that Handel in particular exploited for the Abbey service. King and his singers and orchestra did what they could to evoke that kind of atmosphere, but whether the whole package really offered the audience something revelatory is another matter.

The music is gorgeous and stirringly presented, and to hear Handel's anthems in their original context is certainly fascinating, but the service as a whole was so close to modern royal occasions that the sense of discovery felt with earlier and more exotic re-creations of this type - King's equally faithful reinvention of La Sposalizo, the ceremonial wedding of Venice to the sea, for instance - was missing. Still, lovers of royal ritual will have loved every minute of it.