Henry Purcell - Theatre Music

"Most of the music Purcell wrote for the theatre is relatively little heard and much of the music comes up with striking freshness in these performances using authentic instruments. As well as the charming dances and more ambitious overtures, we are offered more extended scena with soloists and chorus of which the nine excerpts from Theodosius are a particular entertaining example." Penguin Guide

This enchanting record consists of songs and duets from Restoration plays, almost all of them on various aspects of love. The variety is remarkable. Conventional love duets a few (one from Pausanias, ''My dearest, my fairest'', is for soprano and tenor), but in ''No, resistance is but vain'' the two sopranos are both impassioned and funny on an age-old problem. In ''Celemere, pray tell me'' a brother and sister in their early teens innocently wonder why their mother won't let them share the same bed any longer. (In this Emma Kirkby sings both 'He' and 'She', which seems wrong.) Some of the solo songs with words intended for a man are given to a soprano, for instance the one that accepts adultery, ''Though you make no return to my passion'', but this reversal of sexes seems to have been quite usual in songs in Purcell's day.

The two sopranos have nearly all the jam sound celestial when high up in thirds, (''Love, thou are best of human joys''), and Judith Nelson is irresistible in ''Whilst I with grief''—apparently sung in both Dryden's The Spanish Friar and by Mrs Bracegirdle in Don Quixote II—and in the famous song about kissing, ''Sweeter than roses''. In fact this record is full of the loveliest songs most beautifully sung and very well recorded. An amusing curiosity is a quarreling quartet from a bawdy play, The Canterbury Guests, in which two housewives indulge in a scurrilous slanging match until parted by their husbands. What a comic opera Purcell might have written! This quartet is far indeed ahead of its time. Recommended. – Gramophone