Purcell
Welcome Songs for Charles II, Vol.4
Catch: God save our sov’reign Charles
Welcome song: Swifter, Isis, swifter flow
Fantasia a6, In nomine
Fantasia a7, In nomine
Selections from Theodosius
The Lord is my light
Welcome song: The summer’s absence unconcerned we bear
Taverner
Benedictus from Missa Gloria tibi Trinitas
The Sixteen
Harry Christophers Director
CORO 16187
Full price
The Review
The great thing about these volumes by The Sixteen is that they include much more than the obsequious welcome songs, written for minor royal comings and goings from court by a monarch who, after 1660, never ventured much further from Whitehall than Newmarket.
In fact the political context of these pieces meant they were codswallop of the first order and we wouldn’t bother with them now if Purcell, writing under instruction as a (rarely paid) court employee, had not been so professional that he set the sickly verse to such polished music.
This volume contains two welcome songs, produced between 1681 and ’83, when Charles’ reign was becoming increasingly intolerant and unpopular, resulting in the formation of the first two political parties, one of which, The King’s Party or The Tories as they were dubbed by the opposition (being no better than the pirates from Tory Island off the north coast of Ireland) still infests the British state today.
So the palatial gallantry is tempered with two of Purcell’s gorgeous Fantasias for viol consort, a form more prevalent in his father’s time, and the original In nomine setting from the early sixteenth century by John Taverner on which Purcell based his pieces. The real glory of this collection, though, is the selection of numbers that were interspersed in Theodosius or The Force of Love by the best English tragedian of the time, Nathaniel Lee; a big success when it was staged at the Duke’s Theatre, Dorset Gardens in 1680. Still only in his early twenties, he was not yet in the form revealed in the semi-operas of a dozen years later but Theodosius is full of deft and elegant songs, if a little formulaic.
In spreading the solo parts around the light voices of The Sixteen, Harry Christophers ensures that they are as near as we are likely to get to the timbre and quality of the singers who performed at the two official London theatres then; the men often drawn from Purcell’s colleagues in the Chapel Royal and Westminster Abbey, the women from the specialist actresses, some of them not more than fifteen, who were very different from the opera singers imported from Italy a generation later. The singing here is constantly delightful, especially from Katy Hill and Ben Davies. For devotees of London’s music at the end of the seventeenth century these volumes are, for the moment, essential acquisitions.
SM