Sir Hubert Parry was upgraded from knight bachelor to baronet by King Edward VII in 1902, and my goodness he earned it. His anthem for Edward’s coronation, I was Glad when they Said Unto Me, begins with a thrilling brass fanfare – or it has done since George V’s coronation in 1911: Parry’s original introit wasn’t sufficiently attention-grabbing, so he beefed it up. But the most spine-tingling moment has been there from the beginning. ‘I was…’ sings the choir on the tonic chord of B flat major – and then the word ‘glad’ bursts out where we aren’t expecting it, in G major.

One of the secrets of writing ceremonial music is knowing how to raise the temperature by subverting expectations. A few minutes into King Charles III’s coronation we heard a sublime example written by Handel for George II in 1727. Zadok the Priest opens with an arpeggiated prelude that never fails to quicken the pulse: that’s because Handel drifts into minor chords, sneakily disorientating us so that our hairs stand on end when the chorus explodes.

Has it ever sounded more splendid than it did on Saturday? There may have been coronations at which the ratio of musical hits to misses was higher, but I doubt that any of them could match the standard of performance. Judged by last weekend, Andrew Nethsinga, the new organist and master of the choristers at Westminster Abbey, is in the same class as his predecessor James O’Donnell – which is saying something. There was a rhythmic spring to his direction that matched that of the great Sir Antonio Pappano, currently en route from the Royal Opera House to the LSO, who conducted the ad hoc orchestra.

Pappano did his best with Sir William Walton’s Coronation Te Deum, which hovers between masterpiece and dud. Like a number of items on the menu, it was ‘arr. Rutter’, though I wasn’t sure what John Rutter had done to it. Added those drippy harps, maybe? No – they’re in Walton’s original. Anyway, if ‘arr. Rutter’ was the price of not hearing his own sugar-coated music, that’s fine by me. It’s true that we had a short anthem by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Make a Joyful Noise. Apparently the King wanted something people would go out humming. Dame Joanna Lumley on Sky generously described it as ‘stunning’, but conceded that people might have to ‘hear it again’ before they hummed it.

I wonder how the composers whose new pieces were performed before the King entered the Abbey felt about it. Interestingly, they were joined in economy class by Dame Judith Weir, master of the King’s music. In the service itself, Paul Mealor’s Welsh-language Coronation Kyrie was sung by a black-clad Sir Bryn Terfel, who found a different grimace for every note; it was like the moment in an opera where a mysterious visitor shows up with a secret message for the king. But the music was enchanting. Film composer Debbie Wiseman contributed two Allelulias, the second of which was sung by a gospel choir. That would have been fine if it had been written in a gospel style, but it wasn’t. Shapely Anglican harmonies and gyrating hips really don’t go together.

But these are minor criticisms of a triumph. The Abbey staged a musical banquet in which the courses were arranged with diplomatic ingenuity. The King’s statutory declaration that he was a Protestant – not a word favoured by mainstream Anglicans these days – was followed by the ‘Gloria’ from the four-part Mass by the Elizabethan Catholic William Byrd, written for secret performance by recusants hiding from Protestants. There was Greek Orthodox chant and a prayer from the Church’s British leader Archbishop Nikitas, whose gravelly Florida accent must have taken some people by surprise.

But let’s return to where we started, with Parry’s I was Glad and its musically unsatisfying ‘Vivat’ section. In the recording of George VI’s coronation the choir sings ‘Vivat Regina Elizabetha!’ for the future Queen Mother (which comes out as ‘Vivet’ in 1937 RP). This time it was ‘Vivat Regina Camilla!’ – an awkward touch of hubris, perhaps, but at least it will kill off that stupid formula ‘Queen Consort Camilla’. I found it poignant because it brought back strange memories of a Tube journey I took just days after Camilla was named as Prince Charles’s lover. I was on my way back from work. I got on the train at Liverpool Street and so did Mrs Parker Bowles. She sat opposite me all the way through to west London, never once lowering the hand covering her face. Last weekend the media were all talking about the new Queen’s ‘long journey’ to Westminster Abbey, and indeed it has been – 52 years. But I bet none of it seemed longer than those 30 minutes on the Central line.