Queen's Diamond Jubilee: Rupert Christiansen's verdict on the Service of Thanksgiving The Queen's habitual expression of polite impartiality whenever she is confronted by any aesthetic object or performance leaves us with few clues as to her personal taste. When it comes to music, one can only guess what genuinely gives her pleasure - or pain. God alone will know what she thought of the acts at the Diamond Jubilee concert, but I certainly sense her gritting her teeth whenever our direly banal National Anthem strikes up, and I think it would be fair to say that neither the lugubrious Wagnerian sublime nor the acerbic complexity of modernism floats her boat. Highland reels and the mellow cocktail-lounge crooning of Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra are more her style, so those gossipy biographies tell us, and I doubt it stretches much further than that: the musical gene possessed by both her mother on one side of the family and her great-great grandmother Victoria on the other seems to have bypassed her and re-emerged in her first-born son. The question of her preferences in church is slightly different. Here, I think, she puts taste aside and makes decorum and propriety her priority. She is a Church of England traditionalist - a position which comes with a set musical accompaniment, based in a rich corpus of Anglican choral anthems, Hymns Ancient and Modern and organ voluntaries. Happy-clappy is not her thing, and I'm sure even her steely composure faltered momentarily when Elton John sang "Candle in the Wind" at the Princess of Wales" funeral. What we heard today in St Paul's cathedral wasn't a concert, or even a review of the considerable musical achievements of the New Elizabethan era: it was a national service of thanksgiving, marking and endorsing the bond between church and crown and nation, and as such it sprang few surprises. The voluntaries ran the gamut from Handel, Mendelssohn to Parry, Elgar and Vaughan Williams and the hymns included those ripest and most rousing of chestnuts, the Old Hundredth, "All People that on Earth do Dwell" and "O Praise ye the Lord," in arrangements by Vaughan Williams - possibly by HM's special request? Andrew Carwood, Director of Music at St Paul's, is doing a fine job with the choir, and the organ thundered mightily and wheezed meditatively under Simon Johnson and two of his deputies. The only relatively unfamiliar item was "O thou the Central Orb" a rather baggy second-rate anthem by Charles Wood, but there was nothing here to rock the boat: as the pupil of Stanford and Parry and mentor of Vaughan Williams, he is also the composer of "Hail, Gladdening Light" and therefore comes from the heart of the established Church. Born in 1970 and popular on Classic FM, Todd is representative of a modern ecumenical tendency. He's also a self-confessed musical fusionist who likes to mash up, according to his website, "blues, Celtic song, modal melodies, sumptuous gospel harmonies and big atonal chords." But "The Call of Wisdom" wasn't as bad as all that. Adapted from some verses of Proverbs, it starts with a mellow plainchant and moves smoothly into marshmallowy melodic territory - wistful, sentimental and attractive enough. Tasting it blind, I would have guessed it was composed by Rutter and there is surely no harm in it. The Diamond Choir, assembled from schools throughout the land, sang it very nicely, and because it doesn't present any great technical difficulties, I guess it will now become popular with other youth and church choirs. I just wish it had aimed at something emotionally grander and shone with a fiercer radiance. As it was, I was much more stirred by the glorious descant to the last verse of the final hymn, "Guide me, o thou great Redeemer," to the mighty old tune of Cwm Rhondda.