Catherine Bott is the doyenne of only a select group of modern singers who seem unequivocally and repeatedly to relish the exceptional difficulties of Restoration Song. The music of Purcell, his forebears and contemporaries, carries elusive properties, an expressive language which for all but the most technically assured and musically intelligent exponent, cruelly exploits every false move. Those who have heard Bott in this repertoire, her mesmeric “Mad Songs” (2/93) or smouldering Dido (7/94), to name only two, will know the commitment she brings to every type of word setting, however awkward or unusual. This recital is a well-balanced expose of theatre songs, starting appropriately with a founding father of Restoration musical sensibility in Matthew Locke. Then via clusters of Purcell songs, the later generation of Weldon and Eccles are represented, poignantly, in songs from plays produced in the wake of Purcell’s death. Not all the Purcell examples are blockbusters though “Fairest isle”, with some contemporary embellishments, reinforces its show-stopping qualities (Nancy Argenta’s more reflective reading – Virgin Classics, 6/94 – is just as persuasive in its way); “Retir’d from any mortal’s sight” and the much later “The cares of lovers” are genuine declamatory songs which tickle the senses through more arcane means than the measured melodic invention of the ground bass songs such as “Music for a while” or Blow’s Lovely Selina.
In every genre, Bott always seem to know the time and place to impose herself and when objective dignity is the most effective means of projecting the sentiment (such as “The Plaint” which is never cool but, still, distinctly unpersonal as it is in The Fairy Queen). Indeed, most impressive perhaps is the way Bott imparts a broadly self-contained context to each song, not an easy task given that the purpose of such songs in the Restoration theatre is anything but consistent; she warms to Draghi’s noble incantation in a glowing and moving account of Where art thou, God of Dreams?. Also, she delivers a fine sense of colour (occasionally it sits a little too brightly) and perspective throughout, knowing when vocally to ‘withdraw’ the sound into something quietly hypnotic as in Eccles’s “Find me a lonely cave” and when plain speaking is in order as in Purcell’s “Pursuing Beauty”. The instrumental contributions are worthy if a touch undercharacterized for my taste. In short, this is a fine recital which deserves to be widely heard.'